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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23295 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

This is not a Quality Contribution.

This is a Quality Contribution. You really ought to just read the whole thing and maybe not even bother reading my comment.

Patrick McKenzie, if you don't know, knows a lot about financial infrastructure and its interaction with tech, regulatory, and human systems. He routinely shares his knowledge in mostly accessible form online. He is also one of the few authors where I would be shocked if I learned that he used LLMs in his written work. When I read him, he often plays incredibly subtly, almost understating his point, often making me have to think again to see if think he's making the implication I think he might be making. His writing is quite unique in my mind. The linked post is his sizable contribution to the conversation about the SLPC indictment.

When the indictment came out, I didn't really say much. I didn't have a lot of specific expertise on the legal case. I was generally suspicious of how one could draw proper lines around the idea of 'donor fraud', where non-profits are defrauding donors who usually give money to non-profits without any strings attached.1 I upvoted @Rov_Scam's comment to that effect. I don't want to denigrate it; I think it was a great comment, fully deserving of a Quality Contribution in its own right. However, I now (only with the benefit of hindsight of McKenzie's post) think it may have taken a bit too much of a gloss over the bank fraud charge.

McKenzie is very serious about the bank fraud charge. He appears to have lived and breathed a world where bank fraud charges are routinely brought and routinely won by the government. He recounts how incredibly easy it seems to be for the government to routinely win on these cases. I don't know that I have a good summary of this; again, you kind of should just read it. He seems to think that basically any lie to a bank will do (a single piece of paper or a single word, he says), and he goes on at length about the extensive record-keeping done by banks and how these systems allow both internal-to-banks investigators and external regulators to easily find the documents or communications to make such charges a done deal. He gives a plethora of examples of actual people going to prison for these exact charges to make his case.

He then turns to what may be more important for the broader Culture War. Sure, lots of conservatives are vaguely annoyed with the SPLC, but even if they get brought up on charges, how much does that really change in the world? He lays out the technical means by which banks evaluate their customers and their transactions. Some of this might be known to people who were already steeped in this portion of the Culture War, but I hadn't really realized until he laid it all out. Sure, I knew of stuff like OFAC, where the Treasury will give a list of foreigners/entities that US banks are prohibited from dealing with, and sure, they pay close attention to that list and scrutinize their customers/transactions accordingly. But they also use all sorts of other 'data products' to screen out potentially 'problematic' customers/transactions. One of the most widely used was developed by the SPLC, which if you're one of those conservatives who were vaguely annoyed by the SPLC but didn't know this already, get ready for your blood to boil.

Admittedly, as he points out, much of this was actually public information. I just never had it laid out in one place, in a way that really made it sink in what was going on.

Not just banks, but all kind of other tech/finance companies, including regular companies who have employer matching contributions to non-profits, use lists like those generated by SPLC, to filter who they transact with. They want to tell regulators that they take steps not to transact with The Bad People, and how else can they feasibly do that other than to just use the SPLC list? In one of those 'public, but I didn't really know about it/internalize it' moments, he talks about how Amazon used the SPLC list, and how Jeff Bezos talked about it in public Congressional testimony:

Jeff Bezos, in Congressional testimony, describing Amazon's reliance on the SPLC data product for AmazonSmiles, a now-discontinued charitable product they offered:

"We use the Southern Poverty Law Center data to say which charities are extremist organizations. We also use the U.S. Foreign Asset Office [sic] to do the same thing.”

Bezos was interrupted before he could finish his next thought; you're welcome to read the testimony for full context. He is clearly referring to the OFAC SDN list.

Bezos went on to elaborate that the Fortune 2 company could not operate AmazonSmile without some way to kick out the extremist organizations and that SPLC was, effectively, the only reasonable option. He asked Congress for other suggested data providers. None were offered. (No, really, he did that.)

Let us pause to acknowledge that Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, considers these two four-letter organizations as peers. One of them is created by statute, operates within constitutional and administrative-law constraints, and answers to Congress, the courts, and ultimately the people of the United States of America. It could jail Bezos, personally, for willful non-compliance. And the other is …some people in Montgomery with a very specific interest, whose decisions are subject to review by no court, and whose only power appears to be moral suasion.

Bezos was equally and entirely committed to satisfying both.

Why? We’ll return to it in a minute.

[Me here: returning to it after a minute]

Well, remember, when you bought the data product, you were also buying someone anticipating your concerns before you even voice them and preparing options before you ask. Jeff Bezos’ words echo in San Francisco today: Does anyone know another option?

[Me here: returning to it after another minute]

About a month later 15 Republican lawmakers wrote Bezos a letter, saying:

Amazon’s ongoing reliance on the SPLC, with its documented anti-conservative track record, reinforces allegations that Big Tech is biased against conservatives and censors conservative views.

The letter did not contain a recommendation for an alternative data product.

What's next is what may be the biggest impact of the SPLC indictment. Not some guys from some non-profit, no matter how influential, going to prison. Instead:

Now, a quiz: do you think Compliance at a bank is neutral on “Can the bank delegate transaction-level decisioning authority, in any part of the business, however small, to an entity under federal indictment for bank fraud? Does the answer change if they are convicted of bank fraud?”

No! Compliance will not let you do that! Not because they are worried about the integrity of the blacklist. An accused bank fraudster has the final say to approve money movement out of a regulated financial institution. That is very likely intolerable to Compliance.

That is, he thinks that all those companies, those banks, finance companies, internet companies, employers matching contributions to non-profits, etc. will probably have to stop letting the SPLC tell them who The Bad Guys are that they shan't transact with.

His post goes on.

He describes an alliance of non-profits, organized by SPLC, that he describes as having engaged in an extremely lengthy campaign to pressure companies. He describes the mechanics of how their pressure campaign worked, how they burrowed themselves into the policies and workings of many companies. Again, I find it hard to summarize, and you should read, but his persistent theme is to imply that these folks were claiming to be non-partisan in this non-profit work, but building an extensive case that they were clearly targeting partisan targets, and their entire operation dried up after their partisan targets seemed to be no longer a target.

In his typical understated fashion, right near the end, he tells a parable, presumably for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. My interpretation of his parable is that non-profit law requires folks to actually be non-partisan. Of course, non-profit law is not McKenzie's specialty, so others closer to that world will have to chime in. But it seems to me that he's clearly indicating that he thinks it's plausible, perhaps likely, and if The Powers That Be haven't thought of it yet they probably should, for the gov't to continue going after various folks who were involved in this.

1 - For, uh, reasons, I am aware that people can and do attach strings to donations plenty of times. Moreover, I'm aware that from the non-profit's perspective, this can be quite annoying unless they've already chosen to build boxes for those particular strings (e.g., "We have a 'X Fund', and donations marked as going to the X Fund will be used in the X Fund"). In fact, my sense is that plenty of non-profits will simply refuse donations that try to attach additional strings that they don't already have boxes for.

Ok, but what’s to stop thé SPLC from handing it’s list off to some other foundation?

Nothing, obviously. Blue Tribe takes a week to hit consensus on who "owns" the list, and Bob's your uncle. Not to mention that anyone who claims that the SPLC itself will in fact be got here is out over their skis. Obviously, they have broken the law and so they should be prosecuted and convicted. But that's not actually how things work, is it? Procedural outcomes are not deterministic, but rather are manipulated.

A more relevant question is whether the political system he describes is one we should be upholding and maintaining. To a first approximation, it seems to me that everything works this way, and the novel development is that things are happening fast enough that the nature of the system is weakly perceptible. Obviously, the SPLC and every other organization that cooperated with them in their regulatory push should be nuked to ash. Equally obviously, that almost certainly isn't going to happen, and if it did it would not solve the actual problem, which is that Blues fundamentally do not believe that rules constrain their desires or behavior, and do not recognize a need to share society or its mechanisms with those who disagree with them. It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.

To the extent I personally have policy preferences, I prefer the orderly administration of law. Any law we would not be willing to enforce against a sympathetic lawbreaker, a friend, or an ally is a bad law. Until a bad law is changed, it is the law. I reject a legal realism, or legal cynicism, that says that power is the only law.

The Declaration of Independence and D.C. billboards agree: No one is above the rules. We have no kings in this country.

Okay, but power is observably the only law, and anyone who doesn't recognize it at this point is either a fool or a liar. Many people observably are above the rules, and exist in this pleasant state for long periods of time. We do have kings in this country, have and very likely will. Now what?

Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.

It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.

One of the major issues for aware independents/neutrals is that while Blues are doing this while they are in power, can Reds offer any evidence that they wouldn't do the same? The Reds clearly had the power in the 1980s and used it to do pretty much the same thing the Blues are doing now. They used the federal government to write laws to ban behaviors that they felt were morally incorrect, to punish organizations in the outgroup. Is there any evidence that the Red tribe has learn the bitter lesson? Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class of authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?

As moderate evidence, the fact that the Reds tolerated this behavior from people who were often open insurrectionists acting in accord with a hostile foreign power. Just saying, we live in a world where a third of academics refuse to tolerate the hiring of colleagues they consider to be right-wing, no matter how qualified. If Reds were willing to act the same, Bill Ayers would still be rotting in a prison instead of teaching Education at Columbia and communist sympathies would be as much of a hiring black mark as Nazi sympathies.

See I am increasingly cynical that this is not a Red vs Blue split but an Elites vs Proles split. While a case could be made on the sanctity of freedom of speech, to me this looks like the Red Elites not punishing the Blue Elites so that they won't be punished in return. The common man still gets fucked by the laws. The common gay/lesbian was still barred from marriage, Abortion was still banned, Porn is still trying to be banned, DnD was still shunned as devil worship. The rich/elites didn't have to worry about any of these "laws" because they were rich/elite. Evidence of them being exempt is about as convincing as rich blues being exempt from DEI and woke-shit.

Everyone would eventually do this given the ability. It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history. I don’t think we’re that different.

Sure, but is not history evidence that WEIRD Anglo's enforced a classical liberalism morality that strongly emphasized a "fuck you stop bothering me" morality. Seems to me that it won so hard that people are like fish: they aren't even aware they have it until its gone. People are slowly waking up to that fact, and currently are re-inventing all the sectarian conflicts that lead to that morality even emerging.

Maybe people should stop being barely evolved apes and actually just grow up.

I mean other than trying to conquer the entire planet, sure. It’s kinda strange that Anglos invented the idea of conquest for liberal democracy.

I think giving Anglo's the credit/blame for inventing the idea of conquest to be a bit nonsensical. And I'd say classical liberalism and democracy are two separate things. I'd go further and argue that democracy actually exacerbates that weakness/failure of classical liberalism. The crowd is always dumb, and there is nothing dumb people like more than dopamine triggering behaviors. The failure of democracy is that it provides a means to allow such easy thrills to be indulged, provided by the state. And what thrill is more primal, more intrinsic to human nature, and more destructive to communities than intra-tribal warfare.

Universal Suffrage has pretty much fucked us.

It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history.

Which is why we must never rest on our laurels and assume that liberalism has decisively won. We must always be on the lookout for those who seek to turn this world into a penitentiary and themselves into warders. We must maintain CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!!

Damn why does this sound so much like revolutionary Marxism... Yes! Comrade the subversive illiberals must be rooted out before they poison the discourse! Vigilance must be maintainted!

Of course we would, there's no constituency for classical liberalism. But ask yourself- do you prefer school prayer, or school secret gender transitions?

I view them as equal levels of bullshit. The fact that you think one is worse than the other is the point. You think the Red's way is the lesser of two evils.

You don't think one is worse than the other?

I understand you aren't a big fan of prayer in public schools, and probably not Christianity more generally. But if one is an atheist, then following along politely with the Our Father once per day is not a big ask, not in the way that 'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.

To be clear you are clearly biasing the framing towards your viewpoint.

To me you asked me:

  • Would you rather your kids be forced to give a little Sig Heil in the morning and have the school teach them why being gay, crippled, jewish, romani, black, not white and straight is evil and should be killed for the betterment of the community

Or

  • Would you rather your kids be forced to recite the communist manifesto and have the school teach them why being a dirty selfish capitalist is the root of all evil in the world, and if they don't share everything or report on people, including their parents, to the state then they are anti-revolutionary and thus evil.

long politely with the Our Father once per day

Yes a polite Sig Heil is not a big ask.

'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.

Have you tried not oppressively forcing your child to adhere to evil capitalist notions that people are not all inherently created equally?

Your conception of the prayer vs gender pronouns is hysterically biased. It's never just a polite "oh father" just like its never just a polite "please use they/them". Give an inch and everyone takes a mile.

In practice we kinda do know what religion in schools looks like(and it’s not the handmaid’s tale)Christian schools are a dime a dozen.

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The difference is that underage gender transition will only affect a vanishingly small proportion of the underage population, while school prayer affects everyone. There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.

Much of the worry about the school gender crap is precisely worry about what your own kids are being groomed to do.

There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.

At the risk of channeling WhiningCoil, that implies that the progressive version stops at other people's kids. Even ignoring for now the difficult question of how consenting a 13-year-old getting browbeaten by the educational system gets, there's no shortage of directly compelled pro-transgender speech that the state has been quite happy to mandate in schools, and an even broader set that the schools 'don't mandate' they just punish anyone that doesn't go with.

and what your own kids are forced to do

Ah, but [my kids] are forced to affirm a lie (as in, that a man magically becomes a woman because he donned fake breasts and cut his penis off), in exactly the same way, and for the same reasons, as it is for State religions. The school will punish them for blasphemy misgendering if they do not.

Naturally, for those who believe in that, especially for those who draw a salary from that belief, it's just Common Decency.

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Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?

Obviously, which is why the most liberal times in American history come when either Blue is busy destroying Red institutions, or vice versa (or there's an economic boom which distracts everyone; you can't deploy cancel culture lists when people [and in particular cities] are so desperate for workers it doesn't matter at all what their political persuasion is).

Once one side starts consolidating things get bad, which is why 2014-2024 in particular were especially fucked.

This is why independents are the way they are: it's more about Noticing when one side is starting to accumulate enough power to pull this off, and [trying their best] to deal with them. And whether that best is good enough or not generally depends more on economic factors than anything else.

I think this is an interesting thought. Like a trace that economic need/prosperity requires cooperation among a larger subsection of the populace, but once a threshold is achieved, the luxury beliefs of intra-tribal warfare resurges until at which point all the economic surplus is consumed starting the cycle over again.

What did the Reds do in the 1980’s? Is this the war on drugs or banning some swearing? I guess we had LATAM commie death squads but that seemed like both sides were down.

Moral Majority. I'd go so far as to say a lot of the anti-conservative/anti-religious reaction today by the progressives is due to generational trauma inflicted by overzealous authoritarianism by the moral majority. Notice how most of it is not economic leftism but cultural leftism, the moral majority was authoritarian cultural rightism.

I guess I agree with the policies they want. But do you actually think they are the same as what we saw 2014-2024? Sure they did politics. And I could see how someone would find them annoying. But SPLC would basically ban you from the internet, maybe take away your job. Annoying family value rallies just doesn’t seem like the same thing.

The Right passed actual laws in the 70s and 80s that banned gay people from teaching in public schools, or even someone advocating gay rights in public outside of school contexts. And there were the FCC crackdowns on indecent content, e.g. Howard Stern, the Helms Amendment.

There was also quite the panic around video games, movies, music, and board games, though that was admittedly bipartisan. I remember one teacher I had freaking out because I was reading one of those choose your own adventure books, which she associated with Dungeons and Dragons for some reason.

Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.

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I mean the internet didn't exist in the 70s and 80s. Considering the Moral Majority engaged in cancel culture at a similar levels as the Woke/SJW, I imagine, if it did exist the Moral Majority would have wasted no time in cancelling you on the internet. The Moral Majority did try to take away your job...

The moral majority also made a lot of people from Boomers to Millennials, incapable of even conceiving of the left as authoritarian. Gen Z having never experienced it seems a lot more comfortable pushing back against woke excess.

I wonder if its incapability or if has just created such a psychological scar that they perpetually view themselves as the underdog. A lot of ink has been spilled on the weird prog belief, that even as they control much of the establishment, they still genuinely see themselves as the underdog fighting the system. Part of that is undoubtedly the revolutionary marxism, but I wonder how much of it is scarring from the moral majority?

Yeah I predict Gen Z having experienced a decade+ of Leftwing Authoritarianism will swing rightward in the cultural direction while also being leftwing/populist in the economic direction as a direct consequence of their upbringing.

That they had the guts to use the name "Center Investigative Agency" for one of their alleged shell cracks me up.

I wonder if that's deliberate for the purposes of paying people to rat - confusing/frightening them into thinking it's a legitimate government op.

Never mind that I'm pretty sure internal is supposed to be FBI's territory, but I doubt any of the people they were going after were the sort to be familiar with three-letter-agency jurisdictional conflicts.

I don’t think anyone else can run this playbook again. It worked because most firms were looking to play ball so they would only need to get a few renegade scalps. Without everyone else playing ball then there are too many renegades to target at one time.

And you think the whole dirty alliance is going to fold up because one of their tentacles got stung? There are thousands of groups doing exactly what the SPLC is doing in every western country. The SPLC is just one of the more egregious examples, but that hole has already been filled and Amazon/FBI/All FDIC banks are now taking their orders from a different communist NGO funded by capitalist robber barons. We should be finding out which one and what it's called in a few decades, and it will be thrown to the wolves someday, maybe even before we die of old age.

Its detailed in the linked article, but what the SPLC actually "sells" to its donors is the ability to do a massive, coordinated pressure/harrassment (depending on your outlook) campaign against noncompliant institutions that results in reputational damage that can be priced very highly.

So in some sense, it doesnt even matter if the SPLC is convicted, the mere fact that they now have the "potentially fraudulent" label hanging on them means compliance departments not only do not have to, but are arguable legally barred from, having contact with them in the way they used to operate. So the SPLC as a political operative NGO is basically dead in the water.

Also, not sure how they are going to weasel out of their CEO directly admitting to bank fraud in official communications, so as a going concern as well they seem to be in a lot of trouble.

If Mackenzie is right then the facts will scare the hoes Compliance enough to never again directly inject the SPLC agenda into the system, but there's got to be more than one way for the SPLC and friends to skin the cat. There's at least $700m reasons why the dangers of racism aren't going anywhere.

What are the chances this is wrapped up with a bow before a January 2029 inauguration? Even if the DOJ's prosecution wanted to move fast it seems possible this case remains in pre-trial come a Democrat's potential inauguration. Withdraw the prosecution at that point without a viable alternative for anti-racist quasi-regulator -- which Jeff Bezos keeps nervously asking about -- and it's probably back to business. What does MacKenzie think is going to happen when Joe "Thousand Year Reich" Smith makes the headlines in 2030? The regulators, politicians, and financial organs are not going to determine the money must flow simply because there's no more credible SPLC.

So they basically ran the same playbook as AIPAC? Neither has crazy high funding - though SPLC more than I knew - but they were extremely good at targeting a few firms. AIPAC would chop off anyone who didn’t fund Israel.

50-odd years of legitimacy are difficult to hand off.

Whether or not that matters in practice probably varies by industry.

The list itself isn't very useful; not only is it public information, the vast majority of organizations are defunct, meaninglessly small, or so-clearly-legitimate than the SPLC couldn't meaningfully use it against them. There's some Schelling point value in having the list, but as Journolist demonstrated, you can build Schelling points fast.

I think Patio11's trying to motion around where this list itself is a legal risk, at least to the organizations involved here. I just can't tell whether that's actually the case, or him wishcasting.

The list itself is not as important as the SPLC's stamp of approval on it. The SPLC had a positive reputation on the political spectrum from all but the most extreme leftists down to the center right, covering most people who are within the Overton window, and certainly a majority of decision makers in the tech and financial sectors. To these people, they were credible as a non-partisan subject matter expert on what is a hate group or related. Of course, to people deeply aware of the culture war they were obviously a player in it, but there's still a shocking amount of people unaware of the culture war. Or who don't recognize it as a war between two sides with legit grievances, but only as a one-sided "my side who is obviously right" vs "uninformed, stupid and/or evil people". Using their data product for automated checks made sense. Anyone else, or the SPLC itself going forward if it survives this, is going to have a harder time laundering political interference as a non-partisan service. Certainly they'll face more scrutiny.

The reputation of the SPLC does not matter. The left can and does spin up new organizations all the time which are treated by the media and thus by all concerned as if they were absolutely credible experts. If the SPLC falls, they will simply spin up a new organization with some generic sounding name that will have the same reputation as the SPLC but none of its legal liabilities.

Reminded me of Scott's "Freedom on the Centralized Web". It's easy to say that private companies are under no obligation to host your conservative blog and can kick you off whenever they please. But if there isn't a robust ecosystem of competing firms, Amazon refusing to host certain kinds of political content (or payment processors refusing to process transactions for certain kinds of organisation) amounts to de facto total censorship.

That is, he thinks that all those companies, those banks, finance companies, internet companies, employers matching contributions to non-profits, etc. will probably have to stop letting the SPLC tell them who The Bad Guys are that they shan't transact with.

I'm not sure that's the high note, either. Patio11's famously Straussian, and there's a lot of his writing that's focused on stuff after that fact or separate from it. Sometimes that's just him being what he calls a 'dangerous professional' (fintech guy, not Bond villain), but other times it's so he can plant seeds to say 'I told you so' without risking defamation or being clearly wrong.

(I don't trust him, even if I appreciate his expertise.)

The question is where that goes. He's talking compliance rules as if they're something written down in steel, but Itch.io (a company using MacKenzie's own Stripe) still owes Vintage Story 300k+. These aren't rules written in steel even well outside of culture war. There's some clear 'oh, you all do a bunch of the illegal stuff', but at this point it's not even clear that the ultra-clear-cut 'you lied on this form with real clear evidence strict liability' will get anywhere, or that if it does go anywhere, will even get the guy who did it in jail.

Will anyone be able to tell if every compliance officer on the planet decides to just make an exception?

(caveat: I did ask an LLM, though I don't think it gave any useful answers and did not use it to write out this post.)

In his typical understated fashion, right near the end, he tells a parable, presumably for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. My interpretation of his parable is that non-profit law requires folks to actually be non-partisan.

Which is weird, because non-profit law doesn't require you to be non-partisan in the colloquial sense: as he spells out, the rule is against acting "on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office". The second shoe here drops when the IRS joins the ring with a steel chair and pulls charitable org status.

... does that happen? Enforcement of the Johnson amendment has long been more in the than in the breach, and both the Trump 1 and Biden admin's loosened it. The IRS has not, historically, been very happy to beckon to a conservative's call, and that's only been augmented by the Obama-era cuts trying to hammer them for bad past actions. What makes it change, here?

This is not a Quality Contribution.

This is a Quality Contribution. You really ought to just read the whole thing and maybe not even bother reading my comment.

Rov actually posted to this website and argues on this website. Patrick does not.

Also, complaining that someone's post was recognized as a QC when you don't think it deserved to be is churlish. Disagree privately and move on. I certainly don't think every QC is quality, but you don't see me complaining about them.

ControlsFreak specifically recognizes RovScam's argument and post as a QC:

I upvoted Rov_Scam's comment to that effect. I don't want to denigrate it; I think it was a great comment, fully deserving of a Quality Contribution in its own right.

I think the introduction is meant to be self-deprecating: ControlsFreak does not feel his own post is a QC, and that ControlsFreak is only linking to a QC-grade comment that happened offsite.

This is correct. My comment is mostly trash; it's a pointer to something interesting with just enough summary to put it in context and get over the top-level comment barrier. Rov_Scam's is good. McKenzie's is good.

He appears to have lived and breathed a world where bank fraud charges are routinely brought and routinely won by the government.

The root issue here seems to be too much government power; give me six lines written by an honest man etc. It always starts out unobjectionable: of course we want to be able to battle terrorists/drug cartels/child pornography rings. But once the tool is established, its scope of use expands to things that I find unobjectionable (in this case, I have no deep objection to private organizations investigating other private organizations).

And ultimately it ends in endless lawfare, with whoever is in power deploying those tools against their enemies: and everyone is guilty of something, so any complaints can be met with "the law is the law," and defendants can only respond with weak arguments and accusations of hypocrisy. It is, of course, rich for Democrats to complain about this, but it's nevertheless an unfortunate situation.

Bezos went on to elaborate that the Fortune 2 company could not operate AmazonSmile without some way to kick out the extremist organizations and that SPLC was, effectively, the only reasonable option. He asked Congress for other suggested data providers. None were offered. (No, really, he did that.)

Let us pause to acknowledge that Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, considers these two four-letter organizations as peers. One of them is created by statute, operates within constitutional and administrative-law constraints, and answers to Congress, the courts, and ultimately the people of the United States of America. It could jail Bezos, personally, for willful non-compliance. And the other is …some people in Montgomery with a very specific interest, whose decisions are subject to review by no court, and whose only power appears to be moral suasion.

Bezos was equally and entirely committed to satisfying both.

If we assume that the situation is as the author describes it, do you consider this an acceptable state of affairs?

Yes; or, at least, a situation that's to be remedied with other means than government action. It's within the rights of a private organization to want to outsource a blacklist to a third party, and the motivation is sympathetic in many cases. If I run a company, I don't want to be on the news for matching an employee donation to NAMBLA (nor do I want to fund it), but I don't want to spend time or resources collecting a comprehensive list of objectionable organizations.

There's something of a wrinkle here: the kind of progressive blob that the SPLC inhabits and thrives in is itself a creation of the state, and in a world with spherical cows, we wouldn't have that. But that's not going away anytime soon, so its outsized (and overall pernicious) influence is a bullet I'm willing to bite.

I mean the answer to that news story is ‘we run an employee donation matching service and do not know what NAMBLA is’, because normal people generally don’t.

In any case thé knights of Columbus also runs a ‘hateful charities blacklist’, you could probably borrow theirs that lists Aryan nations but not the family research council.

I'm kind of surprised the Knights of Columbus aren't themselves on a "hateful blacklist".

The knights of Columbus are a Fortune 500 company with no reliance on external funding and strong ties to the powers that be, because practicing Catholics are overrepresented in the elites and functionally all male practicing Catholics are members. This makes labeling them a hate group both A) pointless and B) risky.

The $PLC’s ‘radical traditional Catholic’ hate category is indeed full of groups which are not hateful, and those which are not groups, alongside a small number of deranged conspiracy theorists like the dimond brothers’ monastery. But it doesn’t address the knights of Columbus.

It is clearly objectionable that the NGO Blob got to decide who gets deplatformed and debanked. But ultimately it's just another form of the old cancel culture debate. The Blob could not deploy real legal consequences on tech/financial infrastructure companies; its weapon was naming and shaming. Thus its power derived from cultural cachet, from when the SPLC successfully destroyed various actual honest to god KKK groups. The general cultural backlash has sapped its power; presumably that's why their activities in this vein appear to have stopped several years ago and haven't restarted even with Trump 2.

It is clearly objectionable that the NGO Blob got to decide who gets deplatformed and debanked. But ultimately it's just another form of the old cancel culture debate.

I agree, but I think there's another factor in play, which is that there is a tendency for concentrations of social/financial capital to get captured by the Left. Whether it's universities, advocacy organizations, charitable foundations, news organizations, media conglomerates, churches, etc. there's this Leftist meme-virus-like thing which keeps trying (often successfully) to invade and subvert/divert the organization's resources into promoting the Left.

I'm not sure this phenomenon applies exactly to the SPLC, since it was always kind of a Leftist organization, but I do get the sense that over the years it's drifted away from fighting KKK type organizations and more towards becoming a generic progressive organization.

I do get the sense that over the years it's drifted away from fighting KKK type organizations and more towards becoming a generic progressive organization.

Their hatewatch list includes such threatening and violent organizations as the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine and a bunch of immigration reform think-tanks in DC.

They are entirely generic progressive Omnicause organization. As it has been for a while, the demand for anti-black racism outstrips supply, so they have to generate their own and expand "hate."

As well as a large number of ‘hate groups’ which are not groups, or which haven’t been active in 20 years, etc.

It’s worth noting that this is not new for the $PLC- they listed thé family research council back when gay marriage was not even particularly popular, let alone the law of the land, to say nothing of groups whose positions they couldn’t even point to.

The Blob could not deploy real legal consequences on tech/financial infrastructure companies; its weapon was naming and shaming.

I'm very far from certain that's actually the case. I... don't get fintech, but Patio11 regularly points to the regulatory compliance importance of "reasonable controls" as something that an actual hard mandate that has serious actual legal ramifications. "Reputational risk" was an example of that ramification, and so was Operation Choke Point, and so were certain bank pause letters and NCOSE, and it's a hard pattern to unsee.

There's not a law in the legal formalist sense that you could point to a specific statute, but there is one in the sense that the FDIC's personnel might point at a line and shake their heads in a closed-door meeting.

If you take that Straussian reading, it explains a lot of the gaps in the story - both why random banker bigwigs would take meetings from nobodies with big mouths from the SLPC, and more importantly why SLPC advocates would even want them rather than see them as getting gladhandled; why the data product was specifically something for sale and not just a nice website; why so much of the naming-and-shaming gets massive fanfare for audiences that are double- or single-digits scale.

The trouble's that it's nearly-unprovable and entirely-nonfalsifiable.

Reading that it surprised me how much SPLC had by getting themselves attached to some financial plumbing. It almost feels like a true dictatorship had stepped in. If you control funding and access to the online world then perhaps that is absolute power today. We don’t have church groups or the neighborhood pub anymore. If it’s banned online then maybe that’s game over. I always thought SPLC (and the ADL) were just bloggers. I didn’t know they essentially had the fingers in the piping.

Did Trump and Musks save the world? Trump for being insane and getting sued a gazillion times and then getting shot in his head and he kept coming. Musks because he bought Twitter and freed one of the algos.

To me it’s not surprising guys like Catturd popped up now. You had to be an old stubborn bastard to have survived the days and probably unemployable. For the rest of my days I think I’m just going to be a stubborn bastard because there are some unknown powers moving the string.

If the Trump/Musks axis didn’t form I am not sure what saves us. The right didn’t know how to play these games. Now the right has some unbreakable institutional control. Larry Ellison has begun making his own machine. The left turning on Israel if they had still occurred is the only block that may have been able to build a media ecosystem. Otherwise it does feel like complete control of social media plus financing plumbing had been accomplished. It’s quite possible though that internal enough people were getting pissed off at the SPLC game that it was bound to collapse under its own weight. Zuck never struck me as someone big on censorship.

Did we need great men or was this all going to collapse on itself due to being deeply against our notions of American culture.

I trust McKenzies tone because he vibes as a lefty. So if they pissed him off and the whole censorship state then I’m guessing many on the left were looking to get off that ship.

I guess I feel safe for the rest of my life. Musks seems to have his own values and plenty of no-fucks given. I think the average mind is based when exposed to it. So as long as Twitter is free we are safe.

Also never ever talk to the FBI. Lying to a fed is the easiest way for them to nab you.

Otherwise it does feel like complete control of social media plus financing plumbing had been accomplished.

Remember that about half of the Patrick McKenzie article is about an attempt by the SPLC and allies to debank conservatives which failed. See for example this post where he points out that you can tell that there have not been large-scale debankings for conservative political speech because rich Republicans still pay for their lunches in DC using Chase Sapphire Preferred.

There were three sets of contacts between the SPLC and the banks discussed in the article:

  1. Maintenance of a blacklist of extremist nonprofits that various donation platforms used to deny service. McKenzie points out that this blacklist was not widely used to deny basic banking services, because the culture that it is banking does not (and to a first approximation never did) outsource its conscience to the SPLC in the same way that the culture that is nonprofit fundraising did (and probably still does). In so far as the article contains criticism of how SPLC maintained the list, it is that it was underinclusive of extremist organisations that the SPLC found sympathetic (like left-coded terrorist orgs), not that it was overinclusive of mainstream right-wing voices.
  2. Fraudulently opening bank accounts in the names of straw orgs in order to pay off the informants used to maintain (1)
  3. Mostly after the foundation of Change the Terms in 2018, an explicit pressure campaign to kick specific MAGA voices (including the Trump campaign) off the internet, including pressure to debank them. This wasn't done using an electronic blacklist, it involved a series of FTF meetings between activists and bank employees. What was said at those meetings was a combination of "if you don't do what we say, you are a bad person and should feel bad, in particular because you personally will have contributed to black people being murdered by extremists" and "if you don't do what we say, we will call you racist on the internet".

McKenzie is carefully vague about the extent to which (3) succeeded - even more so re. banks than re. big social media platforms. But if there had been widespread debankings after January 6th in response to SPLC pressure, or even with no need for SPLC pressure in the climate that existed in early January 2021, he could have said so. What he says is that there were widespread social media bans, and that some bank accounts that were set up specifically to fundraise for the insurrectionists were closed. If you compare what he says about the post-Jan 6th environment in the US to what he says about the debankings in response to the Canadian trucker convoy, the logical reading is that McKenzie does not think there was a Canada-style debanking of conservatives after Jan 6th, but is not willing to explicitly claim it didn't happen because of the difficulty in verifying a negative.

I'm not going to claim that this was a storm in a teacup. Some bad things happened, and some similar bad things did not happened. Everything in the latest SPLC expose is consistent with the picture in McKenzie's first debanking post, which is that "Americans were denied access to core banking services based on right-wing political speech" is one of the things that didn't.

The world where a coalition of anti-freeze peach leftists controlled bank compliance departments in the way they controlled Silicon Valley Trust & Safety departments looks very different to the one we lived in.

Why do you say Musks instead of Musk?

The bank fraud section sounds a lot like Matt Levine when Levine claims everything is Securities Fraud. Maybe patio11 is going to become the everything is Bank Fraud guy.

"Everything is bank fraud" is a lot less troublesome than "everything is securities fraud" in that bank fraud still requires the same specific steps (a false statement of fact, made to a bank, under circumstances where you can convince a jury that it was intentional) that it always did. People don't usually do that unless either they are committing fraud or there is some other underlying wrongdoing they are trying to conceal.* Whereas securities fraud lawsuits have been brought based on innocent behaviour including true-but-potentially-misleading public statements, omissions, and honest managerial incompetence. On the other hand, "everything is bank fraud" is more dangerous because bank fraud is a crime whereas securities fraud is civil.

So the real argument about "everything is bank fraud" is

  • On the plus side, it makes complex white-collar cases easier to bring and therefore allows serious criminals who would otherwise skate on Chewbacca defenses to be convicted.
  • On the minus side, it turns a lot of non-criminal (like paying hush money to a hooker) or less-criminal (like small-time tax evasion) wrongdoing into federal crimes with a 30-year statutory maximum sentence because you lie to the bank about it.

There are two other practices which make this worse in practice:

  • Prosecutors pushing cases (both to poorly represented defendants and to the media and public) based on cumulating statutory maximum sentences across multiple counts, when the actual sentence will be a single sentence in line with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (and the guideline sentence for a first offence of bank fraud is probation unless the loss to the bank exceeds $15k).
  • The fact that "fraud-for-housing" (lying on a loan application to get a loan you wouldn't otherwise qualify for, but do make a good-faith effort to repay) is almost never prosecuted unless there is a quick default (in which case it looks much more like "fraud-for-profit" where someone is planning to abscond with the loan money) - even if there is an eventual default with a crystallised loss to the bank. So some types of fraud-for-housing (like the occupancy misrepresentation Letitia James was charged with) become common behaviour and are magnets for selective prosecution.

* I don't know why Trump systematically and spectacularly lied about the value (and even the square footage) of his personally-owned real estate in the case that led to the Letitia James lawsuit given that both the Trump Org and the banks insist that it didn't affect the credit decision, but normal businesses absolutely do not do this - partly because it is a crime.

Patrick McKenzie, if you don't know, knows a lot about financial infrastructure and its interaction with tech, regulatory, and human systems.

I know him mostly as the guy who sanewashes debanking, explaining how various obviously political moves are clearly required by the nonpartisan and impartial rules of the banking system. And in the very same article notes how the government had used those rules for barely-plausibly-deniable political action before. So I think he's not a reliable source.

Especially since it seems now he's Noticing that debanking didn't ever work that way.

The SPLC case is clearly political. Everything about the SPLC case is political. It's quite possible, even likely, that they committed various violations; we are in the situation where everyone relevant is a violator and the only question is who is to be prosecuted. The details of the crimes don't matter much either; the outcome of the case will be decided by politically motivated judges and prosecutors. And unless a miracle occurs, either the SPLC will be back in the drivers seat or its principals will simply spin up an SPLD which will magically inherit all the resources and goodwill of the SPLC but none of the crimes.

The SPLC's actions were already political. Live by the sword, die by the sword. This is not like the debanking cases where the people being debanked only interacted with the financial system because they have no choice; the SPLC abused the financial system for political purposes, so being the recipient of some of that is just karma.

And unless a miracle occurs, either the SPLC will be back in the drivers seat or its principals will simply spin up an SPLD which will magically inherit all the resources and goodwill of the SPLC but none of the crimes.

I don't think this is likely. The SPLC had a long history of goodwill, running back to the legitimate civil rights era sainted by so many in the American mainstream. A new organization will not have that long anchor of sanity, it will be a woke organization from the opening shot.

Moreover, I don't really have a valuable opinion on the charges themselves as law, I have a simple layman's opinion on them: they're weird. If I donated to the SPLC, I would expect my money to be used on normal things, not non-profit cloak-and-dagger nonsense.

If I donated to the SPLC, I would expect my money to be used on normal things, not non-profit cloak-and-dagger nonsense.

Based on my experiences elsewhere, I do not think our intuitions match that of the kinds of people that actually donate to the SPLC, or at least there's a vocal contingent of indeterminate number that will happily pay for them to do whatever crazy thing they want.

Thanks for the link, this is enlightening in a not very joyful way.

Frankly, this reads like a description from an industry insider who tries to be neutral and cover the viewpoints of many sides. I will provisionally update on it, it seems unlikely that someone would spend that amount of time on spinning a counterfactual narrative with that little potential for mass attention. It also feels plausible given what little I know from the finance industry and what my guess of SJ aims and methods are.

Nor is it AI, not with:

The statement explained its concern was that failing to censor Trump, in a non-partisan manner of course, would result in voter suppression, via a causational pathway that the margin of the statement may have been too small to contain.

Color of Change’s Robinson was interviewed by Hillary Clinton on her podcast You and Me Both in March 2021. You and Me Both is available on major podcast platforms through iHeartRadio. Readers may recognize Clinton from other work.

Believing the 2016 election had been tainted due to Russian interference was a left-coalition signifier—much as believing Trump actually won 2020 became a right-coalition signifier later. Neither of these views has the evidentiary strength the coalitions claim for them. But they aren’t claims advanced to achieve understanding; they are advanced to achieve alignment and, through it, power.

Amen.

More of McKenzie's dry, subtle humor:

The term of art in industry for the person responsible for the interpretation of a document is the “owner” of that document. Accepting this term of art, many professionals in the industry would agree that if the coalition doesn’t understand themselves to own the policies, it’s tough to guess where they think they should be on the stakeholder-analysis form. “Consulted” doesn’t get to say the owner has blood on their hands after a decision.

On the SPLC ironically lobbying for laws forcing banks to report on NGOs:

Given that this reporting regime is mandatory, on the face of it, if a respected civil rights organization makes a payment to an individual responsible for violence, harassment, and/or terrorism, facilitators would have an immediate reporting requirement. That seems to carry the risk of reporting on the actions of an NGO to a potentially hostile government. That government could be the current one or a future one, because governments have been known to keep written records and employ personnel who serve across generations.

Personally, I hate pretty much everything about the system he describes.

Allowing private businesses discretion over whom to conduct business with is good only if the market is working well enough to compensate individual decisions, and there is no systemic force which provides incentives not to work with some groups. If you have (for whatever reason) a monopoly on some good people need, like shoes or air transport or internet access, then I prefer if the state mitigates the impact of that monopoly by limiting your discretion in choosing customers.

Of course, the banking system is even worse than that, because it is tightly regulated by the USG, and the regulators have a lot of leeway:

If “get on their good side” converges with “not get one’s license to do business revoked” then there is not much daylight between that model and tech’s own.

Basically, if someone were to found a bank specifically for debanked people (excepting the OFAC list), like Nazi orgs or porn producers (though I think there the problem is more credit cards, specifically), they would not get rich by filling a niche left open by the system. Instead, the regulator would crack down on them hard at the first opportunity, and the executives would be lucky to escape with their freedom. "How could I have known that this porn producer would pay an underage porn actor with a fake ID from the bank account" -- "You could just have refused their account proactively, like the rest of the industry".

In a free society, it should be possible for the CEO of a non-criminal business to insult the president without the president shutting down their business in retaliation.

Of course, the potential for selective enforcement is not just to retaliate against banks which allow outgroups to have accounts. Consider:

“By the way, lying to a bank is a crime. It doesn’t matter what you think while you’re doing it. It doesn’t matter why you did it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a sinner or a saint. It doesn’t matter if it is a big lie or a little lie. It doesn’t matter if the bank believes you. Lying to a bank is a crime. And everything you say to a bank will be recorded for decades. It will be routinely forwarded directly to law enforcement if the forward-deployed intelligence analysts we force the bank to hire believe there is even a tiny chance law enforcement will find it useful.”

This seems completely fucked up. If your lie is material in gaining a loan from a bank which you then default on, then I agree that it is reasonable to criminally prosecute you for defrauding the bank. In most cases, this will probably involve forged documents (so you are on the hook for that, which should carry a higher penalty), because when you e.g. apply for a mortgage, the bank is hardly going to take your word when you claim you own some property.

I do not particularly like money laundering, and agree that it is useful to have laws on the books against it to make it harder for criminals to spend their ill-gotten gains. However, McKenzie certainly makes it sound like 18 USC 1344 also applies to people using banking services normally while lying to a bank:

They incorporated North Dimension, a shell entity. Some shells have legitimate business purposes; this one existed only to deceive. North Dimension filled out a due diligence questionnaire. SBF signed it. It said North Dimension traded on its own account and did not handle customer funds.

You need two bits of evidence to convict SBF of bank fraud. The first fits on one page of paper held by one bank. The second is the answer to a single question: “Did at least one dollar of customer funds flow into the North Dimension account?”

Crazy if true (which I have little reason to doubt). Reading the statue, it seems very plain that a dealer who parks his ill-gotten gains in a bank account (after having affirmed to the bank that it is not illegal funds) and later withdraws them again was not what the legislature had in mind when they wrote it. Heck, I would rather argue for either "2A only applies to its era's firearms" or "2A applies to nukes" than "1344 includes victimless fraud", because either of the first two seems much more solid than the last one.

The overall gist I get is the old 'everyone commits five felonies a day', and the USG gets to pick whom they prosecute.

Also, it seems like for the SPLC, they die by the very same sword they lived by.

Is this culture war? I'm not entirely sure anymore. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, and I'm not, not really, just wearied of it all.

So... list of recommendations of new SF/Fantasy popped up on a social media site (okay, it's Tumblr) and it's a mix of some continuing series (that I've never read but have at least heard of, e.g. Murderbot and the Ann Leckie Radch universe) and new novels. Much what you'd expect, except this one stuck in my attention like a splinter:

We Dance Upon Demons, Vaishnavi Patel (12 May). A reproductive health care worker fights both human attacks on her clinic and supernatural attacks after she develops mysterious powers.

My immediate reaction was "that means abortion provider". And whaddya know?

In We Dance Upon Demons, depressed twenty-something Nisha is the volunteer coordinator at an understaffed and beleaguered abortion clinic. After a strange encounter with an Indian statue in the museum, Nisha is plunged into a strange world of demons and monsters–but in the end, the supernatural may not be as dangerous as the very human threats to her clinic…

So where's the culture war? Well, apart from the pro-life protestors being portrayed as screaming bigots and (of course!) the obligatory raped twelve year old*, it's just that I'm tired. There's not even the honesty of calling this what it is: abortion. No, it's "reproductive health care". That is the new shibboleth, I understand that, it's just... okay, the battle has been lost. Abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right, like food and water. We've long moved on from "sadly necessary, safe legal and rare" to "of course you're going to kill the baby, but it's not a baby, it's not a life well technically okay but not a real life, it's not a person, what do you mean murder, now please sign my petition about shrimp and AI are conscious entities that we should give legal rights so they can't be enslaved".

Yeah. I'm tired and I don't know where we're going from here on in, but if AI does turn us all into paperclips, we have no bloody leg to stand on in opposition.

*You think I'm joking?

While the individual scenes are brutal, like a raped twelve-year -old being called a murderer by protesters as she tries to get into the clinic, it’s the sheer relentlessness of it all that stood out to me. Every day, Nisha’s job is to escort patients trying to access basic health care through a mob screaming abuse, and it never stops.

Is the twist that the Shadow Daddy demon is actually Moloch himself, and his real interest is protecting the industrial-scale supply of child sacrifice?

That might be a genuinely interesting story.

Probably Kali or similar, given the cover imagery. And yeah, if it were Moloch or Lilith that would be a twist, but it'll be played straight: the demons are the good entities (easier to pull off with Hindu mythology) and the 'good' guys are the monsters, those wicked awful Christians!

I should probably put on the hat, but I'm tired too, and I suppose I'd rather just argue with you.

We've long moved on from "sadly necessary, safe legal and rare" to "of course you're going to kill the baby, but it's not a baby, it's not a life well technically okay but not a real life, it's not a person, what do you mean murder, now please sign my petition about shrimp and AI are conscious entities that we should give legal rights so they can't be enslaved".

No, we haven't. We refined our apparatus for retrieving and signal-boosting the most offensive possible formulation of any given argument. Now you get to be exposed to a mawkish, progressive strawman of your position. Now I get to read your performative strawman of mine. Wonderful.

In every jurisdiction where the issue has been subject to democracy (mostly countries outside the US, but now including red and purple states which have had abortion referenda post-Dobbs) the voters behave a lot more sensibly than the advocates. "Abortion legal until the baby is pronounced alive by the duty paediatrician" is not an electorally serious position except in places where trolling conservatives is more important than policymaking. "Abortion banned from day one and the law actually enforced" is not an electorally serious position in post-sexual revolution societies. If it is still the case in ten years time that every non-referendum state in America is at one of those two poles, it will be because state-level democracy no longer works.

No, we haven't. We refined our apparatus for retrieving and signal-boosting the most offensive possible formulation of any given argument.

Do you think those people don't exist? Aren't representative? There's no need for algorithmic refinement to make Internet Feminists sound like unrepresentative strawmen, they do just fine on their own.

Aren’t representative.

Actually, I’ll bite the bullet and say they don’t exist. Show me someone who argues for shrimp welfare and abortion in the same breath, and I’ll show you a rhetorical flourish, a pairing selected specifically for its shock value. A modest proposal, even.

But the Internet is vast, it contains multitudes, so I’ll stick with the more defensible claim. Sermons intended for the choir don’t reflect policy. As @MadMonzer noted, the vast majority of the U.S. maintains some intermediate position on abortion, one which looks an awful lot like “safe, legal, rare.” Viability is the most common limit. This reflects a moral intuition that abortion is permissible, but unsavory in direct proportion to the amount of gore. That’s more or less where the Overton window has stayed since the development of modern contraception. Neither the religious right nor the Tumblr left is happy about it; how fortunate that neither of them dominates the public square!

Show me someone who argues for shrimp welfare and abortion in the same breath

Ozy, maybe? Nicholas Decker. Probably Matthew Adelstein/Bentham's Bulldog.

Sermons intended for the choir don’t reflect policy

How unfortunate that they escape containment and poison policy and common discourse!

how fortunate that neither of them dominates the public square!

One's a lot closer than the other, but Ralph Northam's out of office now. I guess we'll see if Spanburger resurrects that position.

I only wish everybody here poisoned the discourse as hard as shrimp guy. Look at that! Polite explanation of the two main schools of thought.

Abortion laws do not follow Tumblr. California and New York and Virginia all have third-trimester bans. The states with no time limit include Alaska and Michigan. Saying shit on the Internet is free, but when the rubber hits the road, most Americans—most American politicians—endorse the same moderate position which HereAndGone is lamenting.

Virginia all have third-trimester bans

Not for lack of trying, of course.

most Americans—most American politicians

Not the same thing and I disagree with you about the politicians. But fair enough that saying shit on the internet is free.

Abortion opinion has stabilized, and pro-life views are better represented legally now than they've been in decades. Socially, although the book is definitely something that reeks of the 2020s, abortion opponents aren't in the worst place they've been.

There's a narrower critique to be had about why this particular book was published and marketed, and here vibe-wise I agree there's been a shift in the culture war aspect. But it's more about the class that written works now originate from: not to put too fine a point on it, well-educated, materially comfortable women, who have cohered into a distinct block that takes a maximalist pro-abortion position. This was relatively uncommon in the safe, legal, and rare era, but it now dominates elite institutions, including publishing. Men mostly don't care about abortion except insofar as opposing it cuts off social opportunities, so pro-abortion wins by default.

What I would like to know is sales numbers on the book, and how much purchased copies of it are read. Does it have an actual audience that reads it?

Does it have an actual audience that reads it?

Probably, though I agree sales of books are going down. It's one of those "fifty different versions of romantasy/urban fantasy/paranormal chick-lit churned out by not even mid-tier authors now self-publishing is viable" and will sell on Kindle but not set the world on fire with sales figures.

There's a small but definite audience for this kind of feminist LGBT+++ representation stuff, and the bonus cherry on top is probably that "she's a BIPOC author!" so the white readers can pat themselves on the back for their broadmindedness in expanding their reading list (we're a good few years on from Racefail but there are still new finger-waggers coming up who want to lecture us all on what we're reading and how we need to read more Black queer feminist genre works or whatever, there was an amount of this for Black History Month in the USA).

Based on the review you linked, it sounds like the book was written by someone who used to volunteer for Planned Parenthood, and it draws on her experiences from that time (even if she adds supernatural elements.) While it is still probably crap (since 90% of everything is crap), that at least feels like a book that could have some interesting roman à clef-style presentations of real experiences the author had, if it was in the hands of a competent writer.

There's not even the honesty of calling this what it is: abortion. No, it's "reproductive health care". That is the new shibboleth, I understand that, it's just... okay, the battle has been lost. Abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right, like food and water.

There definitely seems to be a one reality, two screens effect here.

Pro-life people like you get to claim that the battle is lost, and abortion is now enshrined as a fundamental human right. While pro-choice people can point to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade four years ago, and a patchwork of state laws that look like this and claim that the battle is lost, and women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States.

I tend to be a federalist on a meta-level, and so I tend to think kicking a controversial issue to the state level to let the voters decide is probably the better choice. Especially since I assume a federal ban, or a return to federal permissiveness will probably continue to have a corrosive effect on American politics.

We've long moved on from "sadly necessary, safe legal and rare" to "of course you're going to kill the baby, but it's not a baby, it's not a life well technically okay but not a real life, it's not a person, what do you mean murder, now please sign my petition about shrimp and AI are conscious entities that we should give legal rights so they can't be enslaved".

While I'm sure much of the grey tribe are more "blue" when it comes to the abortion debate, I actually don't think that the combination of positions you outlined here is a very common one overall.

I tend to think kicking a controversial issue to the state level to let the voters decide is probably the better choice.

I've never understood how, if Alice in Austin is pregnant and does not want to be, Bob in Big Spring compelling her to remain pregnant is less of an imposition than Carol in Cambridge telling Bob to mind his own.

For me it, it is more about pragmatism. Most court-mandated expansions of civil rights in the United States started underwater with the public, and got more popular over time. Roe v Wade did not, and instead it created a wedge issue that made the quality and tenor of American politics worse over the affected period. I actually think politics (narrowly considered) has gotten slightly better since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, because the abortion debate has cooled down as a national issue, and become a state-level one.

Alice in Austin is pregnant and does not want to be

Strange, then, that she voluntarily did the pregnant-making thing.

Yeah no... Sex is not the pregnant making thing. Sex is just Sex. It can be done for any number of reasons. Pregnancy is merely a risk of Sex. Provide an actual argument that the sole telos of sex is procreation or leave your Christian-derived beliefs in your own life.

Christian-derived beliefs in your own life.

I know the "pregnancy isn't a natural result of sex!" crowd hates Christians with a white-hot passion mirroring their hatred of having consequences of their own actions more generally and so want to blame them for all the evils in the world, but it's entirely possible to come to the conclusion that pregnancy is a result of sex from a secular perspective.

"Sex is just sex" is nonsensical, like saying "Russian roulette is just Russian roulette, I didn't know I might die."

crowd hates Christians

Well, I don't. Nor do I hate dealing with the consequences of my own actions. What I do hate is hypocrites and unfairness. So if all you pro-lifers want to commit to an unlimited duty to suffer every risky outcome of your actions, I'm willing to accept every risky outcome of my own. Until that happens, this has nothing to do with the straw effigy you've created in your head. From my vantage, you want your cake and to eat it too.

And Christians want everyone to use their frame of the universe while not even considering any others, again, hypocrisy.

entirely possible to come to the conclusion that pregnancy is a result of sex from a secular perspective.

I'm all ears, please share a non-culturally-Christian argument on the unitary telos of sex:pregnancy.

Any biologist? Yes, sex in humans doesn't result in pregnancy literally every time, but it's the regular natural outcome and the prime evolutionary purpose of its existence. It takes considerable contrivance in terms of decades of biochemistry and materials science to prevent regular sex resulting in pregnancy, and sometimes even then sometimes that contrivance fails.

It's like exploring flooded caves or BASE jumping off buildings - it's not meant to go wrong, but everyone knows it sometimes does, and the only reason you're at risk is because you enjoy the activity enough to put aside the possibility of failure. Most people don't want such high risk and consequently don't do those activities.

it's the regular natural outcome and the prime evolutionary purpose of its existence

I mean would you extend a biological and evolutionary determinism to everything else humans do?

More comments

To note, from what I’ve heard, a substantial part of contraceptive failure- I don’t use the things myself- is that people don’t like them. They discomfit people because they’re unnatural, so people take shortcuts, they cheat, they try to get away from it.

It’s an entirely human reaction to refuse to do the thing right, when you know the thing itself is wrong.

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please share a non-culturally-Christian argument on the unitary telos of sex:pregnancy.

Nature does a perfectly fine job of that, and you've displayed your unwillingness to accept it. I do not think there is any argument I personally can craft that can overcome your bias against it.

Edit: I'll take a quick stab. For one, I never said unitary telos.

I recognize that not every sex act leads to pregnancy. However, pregnancy is the natural consequence of sex absent interference. We are sexually reproducing beings. Ergo, pregnancy is a natural consequence of having sex. To have sex is to accept that risk.

Nature does a perfectly fine job of that

The natural argument is bad, biological determinism is not deployed in almost any other argument because it has very horrible ramifications. So using it for "this one case" is an arbitrary boundary drawing that fails to lead to a general solution.

I never said unitary telos

This is better.

pregnancy is the natural consequence of sex

There is a causality logical assumption in this that is incorrect. If A -> B it does not mean that B -> A. ie If pregnancy occurred, then sex/reproduction-related conditions occurred. Does not follow: If sex occurred, then pregnancy follows.

Pregnancy is a natural risk of sex, but not every sex absent interference results in an intended pregnancy. People have plenty of sex with the purpose of getting pregnant, and not getting pregnant even when its the intended outcome. The reverse is also true.

Ergo, pregnancy is a natural consequence of having sex

Agreed

To have sex is to accept that risk.

I do not agree. Assumption of risk is never assumed to be accepted, hence why every risky activity involving other parties generally requires you to sign papers assuming that risk onto yourself and acknowledging it. This is what I mean by "an unlimited duty to suffer every risky outcome of your actions" Most people do not believe that, but then to draw an arbitrary line around sex is in essence trying to have your cake and eat it too.

It doesn't require a shred of Christian belief to recognize that sex is the pregnant making thing. That is basic biological fact. We enjoy sex because it was advantageous (from an evolutionary POV) for us to do so, but that is not the primary purpose. The primary purpose is to reproduce.

basic biological fact

So are these:

  • The Prostate is accessible through the male anus, and produces a better orgasm than penile stimulation. Thus receiving anal sex as a man is the biologically correct behavior for non-procreative sex.
  • Hunger evolved to keep organisms alive, so eating for pleasure is defective
  • The mouth, tongue, lips, lungs, and vocal tract have biological survival functions for the consumption of food. Yet humans use them for language, affection, comedy, poetry, singing, worship, debate, and lying. Obviously the latter are thus all immoral.
  • Men are generally stronger, more physically aggressive, and historically performed more combat roles; therefore men are naturally suited to rule, and women are naturally suited to domestic subordination.
  • Women are biologically evolved to give birth and rear children, thus it is sole purpose of women to give birth and rear children. Them doing anything else than just have sex and giving birth is morally abhorrent.
  • Reproduction has an evolutionary function therefore society should enforce reproductive norms according to biological “fitness”
  • “Natural” behavior includes cheating, coercion, status competition, and abandonment, these are obviously all morally ok then.
  • Rape is a natural reproductive strategy and is thus moral.

Arguments deriving morality and telos from biological determinism lead to the justification of behaviors the vast majority of humans consider abhorrent. To deploy it in this one case is cherry picking an arbitrary boundary line.

This post is one giant strawman. Nobody said that it's immoral to have sex for pleasure, people said that sex is "the pregnant-making thing". Which it is.

Others have already explained my point better than I could have, so I'll just say the following: I'm not arguing from Christian-derived beliefs. Sex out of wedlock, okay, fine, not ideal but it can work. Aborting retarded and unviably sick kids, nasty but necessary. Deleting public welfare to remove the bottom from society so that people can actually fatally drop out, now that's my hobby-horse. No, I'm pretty sure I'm not arguing from Christian-derived beliefs.

I'm arguing from a hatred for naive, short-sighted, hedonistic, asocial stupidity, no matter how deeply entrenched that stupidity is in the zeitgeist, or to what a degree I myself share in that stupidity.

Life. Life cannot be without procreation. Procreation is sex. Sex makes new life. That makes sex, honest sex, one of the most important acts in the human world. Declaring that sex can be done for any number of reasons may be factually correct, but it's also comically missing the point of it. No matter how much fun it is for how many people, that fun exists only to make people have sex in ways that produce offspring. Everything else is a byproduct, a side-effect, a distraction. Sex being fun is great, because it makes us make babies. Sex being decoupled from the baby-making is a civilization-endangering cultural stupidity.

I'm arguing from a hatred for naive, short-sighted, hedonistic, asocial stupidity, no matter how deeply entrenched that stupidity is in the zeitgeist, or to what a degree I myself share in that stupidity.

I mean from a purely eugenic argument, the vast majority of people who get abortions are poor, short sighted, high-time preference individuals who are a net negative on the society that hosts them. A civilization that is full of them is already endangered. It is civilization-destroying to let the stupid outbreed the intelligent. Abortions combined with your lack of public welfare would greatly reduce that amount of people in the bottom rung of society.

Yes.jpg. But by the point society embraces eugenics, I'm pretty sure we're already back on track to sterilizing or euthanizing those deemed unsalvageable. Horrors, to be sure. But perhaps necessary horrors, to delay human obsolescence. And probably not going to happen.

For Alice it's no less of an imposition, but there ought to be fewer dissatisfied Alices and Bobs. Handling things on a more local level means that more people live in localities where their preferences are law, and that, if the current state of the law is intolerable to you, it's easier to move somewhere where it isn't. Abortion is something of an odd case here: There's little reason to care whether shoplifting is de-facto legal in California if you don't live in California, but pro-life people care very much whether 'baby murder' is permitted anywhere. But on the margin I still think they'd rather it happen somewhere else than right next door, so Federalism does increase satisfaction of preferences.

women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States.

See, that's my point. Murdering the child in the womb is a woman's right. If you can't kill your baby it's the exact same as being chattel. How the fuck did we get to this point? I lived through it, and I still don't understand it.

As a rhetorical device, anyone who wants to can try to frame something as a right, in order to try and put it beyond the realm of debate and discussion.

As a political reality, unless the government enshrines it in some way, none of the rhetorically claimed rights are truly rights.

I guess I don't understand what you're confused about here. You even cited other non-existent rights in your OP here: food and water. No such right to food and water exists, at least in the United States.

No, she’s saying, “how far did we fall, that the right to kill your own baby in the womb on demand is considered to be the most important right a woman needs, the main thing that distinguishes women from chattel?”.

You may disagree with the framing, of course. Personally, I am more sympathetic to the pro-abortion side than Here and think the Euros (but not the UK or Anglo countries) have it broadly correct. First 8 weeks or so it’s not really human in any meaningful biological way IMO. After that period is ended the right to abort should, aha, terminate.

In anglo countries we seem to have got into this weird maximalist position where if you can’t kill a baby a month before birth then you are a slave, the baby has no rights until literally the moment it’s squeezed out of the vagina, and the whole thing is celebrated and glorified in a way that is very weird from the outside - a miscarriage is a tragedy but a late stage abortion is a beautiful assertion of the right to one’s body. I get the reasoning but it’s a bit much.

Yeah it's just the contradictions inherent to it all.

Miscarriage/hypothetical forced abortion is a tragedy but a willing one it's a clump of cells

At an evolutionary level, females being able to control which males procreate is generally done after the fact, rather than before. Both men and women can be ruthless about whose genes get passed on.

Every year, six hundred thousand dudes get culled from the gene pool after they got their swimmers in.

A fetus passing away after being separated from the host is as such not the moral fault (if there is any to be found) of the would be mother, but rather an “innocent crime”, more of a natural occurrence than anything you could or should hold a person liable for.

The problem I've always had with this framing, is that it only seems to exonerate rape victims, and perhaps people who never received comprehensive sexual education. Basically everyone else understands that sex can lead to babies, and thus knows that they could be on the hook for that consequence.

To use a slightly whimsical analogy. Imagine a strange lottery, where besides the jackpot and small prize offerings, there is also a widely advertised "downside" of participating in the lottery, where there is a chance your circulatory system will be connected to that of an unconscious, famous violinist for 9 months until they have recovered from whatever disease ails them. The fine print does mention that you can unhook yourself from the violinist at any time, but they are guaranteed to die in that circumstance, as they will have become utterly dependent on you for their continued life and existence.

Unlike the original violinist thought experiment, where a person is hooked up to the violinist against their will, it is not at all obvious to me that it is moral to unhook yourself from the violinist once you have been hooked up in the lottery scenario. You voluntarily chose to take part in a lottery where you knew there was a chance that you would be hooked up to the violinist, and now that their life is dependent on your decision and they depend specifically upon you, I'm not sure that I think it is okay to unhook yourself, purely from an intuitional perspective.

I tend to be a federalist on a meta-level, and so I tend to think kicking a controversial issue to the state level to let the voters decide is probably the better choice. Especially since I assume a federal ban, or a return to federal permissiveness will probably continue to have a corrosive effect on American politics.

This isn't going to stick. In a world where abortions were minor surgeries and where travelling across state lines to have the surgery was (a) hard to conceal and (b) likely to be a long way because abortion policy would follow the red/blue divide, which is approximately sectional, rather than being an idiosyncratic feature of each state, this could stick. But in the world we live in, most abortions involve a small number of pills which can be posted from a legal clinic in a blue state, or in extremis illegally by a private citizen who obtained the pills with the tacit approval of her blue-state government. So either the federal government enforces laws* against mail-order abortion pills, or red state abortion laws are unenforceable. And enforcing those laws against the wishes of the (people and governments of) the blue states where the federal crimes are being committed is likely to become an ongoing ICE-in-Minneapolis level ugly political standoff.

Admittedly all this is an improvement because it takes federal abortion policy away from SCOTUS and puts it back into democratic territory.

* One relevant law is already on the books - the Comstock act prohibits sending abortifacients through the US mail. My understanding is that there is also a broad power for the FDA to restrict prescribing of drugs which are at risk of being illegally diverted without the need for new primary legislation.

a small number of pills which can be posted from a legal clinic in a blue state

IIRC current telehealth rules revolve around the locale of the patient, and traditionally doctors are licensed by the states and only have authority within those states. While blue states have allowed this (and I'm not even sure it bothers me too greatly), I wouldn't expect it to not get challenged in court WRT state extradition law and such, or for red states to find an equivalent axe to grind to upset blue state authorities on similar jurisdictional grounds.

While pro-choice people can point to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade four years ago, and a patchwork of state laws that look like this and claim that the battle is lost, and women's rights are a dead letter in much of the United States

And they're be wrong and stupid, given mifeprestone mailing and that abortion is up considerably post-Dobbs.

There'd be some funny bits if this was just the dark mirror to those wacky christian film and book publishers, but Saga's a Simon and Schuster imprint, and not even one of the really wacky imprints. But it's still the same thing, just with a slight glazing of prestige. And given the extent that mainstream publishing is dying, it's not that much prestige.

It's... hard to figure out what deeper to say.

I haven't read the book, so I can't review it. It's possible that there's something interesting or deep under the obvious political allegiance, though I'm pretty skeptical. And while I've bought some books with really bad covers and interiors -- Morning Glory Milking Farm is going to be on my Kindle account forever -- I'd like to at least pretend I've got some dignity. At least the normal slop is cheap. And I don't think it would sate many frustrations, rather than highlight what a more serious engagement with the author's favored policies could have done instead.

If we want to focus on how it's a shallow version of its own politics, that's something with more meat and doesn't require a few hundred pages of less-than-AO3 grade urban fantasy. And it is shallow, both from that summary, from its own synopsis, and from the various reviews.

It's trying to rip from the headlines, except the headlines kinda suck. Chicago had a 2024 big deal over coordinated protests, except they looked like this. The city's had buffer zone laws since 2009! There were a couple heavily-reported cases in the US involving 10-12-year-old rape victims, but the controversy in each case involved questions like is the rape exception well-known enough written by reporters or whether the case had happened from people wanting the rapist prosecuted. I'd wager that the climax of the book involves a physical attack, probably a firebombing, except the real world versions of that are a lot less exciting, too.

Yes, it's a fantasy story, there aren't (presumably) Indian demons stored in a random museum you can touch, either. And the Indian demons (presumably!) aren't the real-world metaphor the author's trying to discuss, here.

Except they're not trying to discuss it. Anti-abortion activists are monsters or the outgroup in a deeper way than vampires or demons or dragons would be. The protesters being entirely unsympathetic and uncomplicated is the point, not a failure. It's the same reason that you make Dracula a dick in addition to a bloodsucker if you it to be really cathartic when he gets ground into concrete. There's an irony when that comes from someone talking up the complexity of real solutions, but there's nothing deeper to that complexity than people disagreeing with her.

That seems more critical than the weird discourse norm where whatever progressives want today is The Biggest Most Important Right Ever that can't have any limits at all, and then those actually-written-down-rights have all those penumbras and exceptions and balancing acts. But it's also less fun to point at.

Morning Glory Milking Farm

How is this? I've been looking for a contemporary "spicy" book to read to get a better sense of the genre, and I've seen it mentioned a couple times.

Alexander Wales wasn't impressed by the quality of the worldbuilding.

That's the best book review I've read since Field & Stream reviewed Lady Chatterly's Lover:

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.

Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.

Wales is either disturbingly autistic, writes for an autistic audience or is really good at writing like one for the lulz.

It’s the latter. Both of the latter.

If you're curious about it, ShoeOnHead did a review of it.

FYI it's worth remembering that "smut written for women" and "smut written for men" are completely separate genres, even within nonvisual literature.

"Is Morning Glory Milking Farm closer to Henry Miller or Murakami?"

All I'm saying is, if you have any interest, even peripherally, in being genuinely entertained, you should seek out smut deliberately targeted toward your own gender. (Which, based on my preconcieved notions of the motte's demographics, I'm guessing is probably male.)

If you're interested pruriently, smut for your own gender is a better idea. If you're looking to point and laugh instead, I'm guessing "Morning Glory Milking Farm" will work quite nicely for male Mottizens.

It's not great as 'spicy' romance goes. That may not be what you're asking.

Pros: it is extremely accessible.

It's straight, and not asterisk-straight or orgy-straight or furry straight or werewolf pinata straight or MMF straight. There's a blink-and-you-miss it mention that might be a gay (or gay4pay) guy existing for a background sentence, but the story is pure girl-on-guy.

Despite the name (and front cover), it's surprisingly vanilla. The guy's basically just a rich dude with a big dick and horns, the woman's just service sector employee even if her 'it's not sex work' deflection is pretty transparent, the actually erotic scenes aren't actually focused around glory hole or prostitution kink. Most of the book focuses on handjobs and a large volume of semen, but without the rod-and-tackle 'worship' that's likely to be off-putting to straight guys (though it's definitely not written for men in terms of pacing and tone). Some very mild size difference and enhibitionism (don't get caught kink), but less than someone familiar with the genre would expect. That's more common than you'd expect from the 'female gooner' genre, but if you're looking for remotely deep monsterfuckery (artist: pantheggon. cw: f/f, mind control) you're going to be unimpressed.

It's also relatively short, as this sort of smut goes, while still being a full book rather than a short story. There's a joke about even really bad or dubcon smut being a better love story than Twilight, and damning with faint praise, but it's also half the length of the first Twilight book. If you want a sample without spending days on it, that's a bonus.

It's heavily tied into woman's psychology, and there's a lot of early scenes that are very sexual but not very erotic to support that framework. That makes it less interesting for most male readers, myself included, but if you want a good glimpse into monsterfuckery as permission structure to experience the desirable taboo, it's here, if not in a particularly grand form.

Cons: there's not much more to it than smut. Charitably, it's a romance... and so little will-they-or-won't-they (or even who-will-they) that I'd be hesitant to put it in that category; at most you get some who's-this-other-girl that resolves in minutes. That isn't unusual in the genre, but it makes it worse as a representative compared to some of the often-ludicrous plots or dramas that can come up. Still, the tension's low enough that it's a bit of a slog if you're not looking for the next sex scene, and all your suspension of disbelief has to go into the setup.

The windup to the sex isn't very erotic, and I'd expect it's even less erotic for straight guys. Part of that's a genre convention matter where the not!sex worker runs into a bunch of loser johns so The One really stands out, but it means you get a lot of premature ejaculation jokes in your porn, and not even sexy premature ejaculation, and it's not the only form (or worst) on that. The protagonist and her husbando-to-be do better, and there's some decent pacing so that when they finally get with each other outside of work it feels more reciprocal, but for the first half of the book you're getting a woman jerking a guy off, and the later jilling herself.

The prose is okay at best. There's the descriptions are sometimes a little off and you get some tense mismatches, but you're not facing a ton of simple typos or physical impossibilities. If you read a lot of fanfic, there's some tics that are really annoying (my god people, don't write sequences of a person's body parts acting individually during conversation scenes!); casual readers will probably just find them weird. Likewise, it's very fanficcy when it comes to sex scenes. If you want an idea of what conventions AO3 smut takes to a sex scene, a bunch of them are present here and distilled. Nothing to the point of dubious lube (cw:ouch), but don't think too hard about the anatomy.

The guy is boring, even by the standards of the genre. He's well-off, and tall, and has a deep voice, and is an ethical businessman, and he's divorced but it's not acrimonious, and he listens, and it's like they started with the character and then forgot to give him anything else to do. That's... probably better for a straight male reader, but it's a little unusual given the centrality of Guys Showing Vulnerability.

That said, most of the better stuff I can name is either furry, older, gay or bisexual, or some combination of all three. That's probably more an artifact of what I read than the state of the field, but limits my ability to speak on the matter.

I can't even accuse them of hypocrisy with the "it's not abortion, it's reproductive health care!" bait-and-switch, since it may have started as pabulum to persuade the centrist ordinary people to their side ('abortion legal yes but with some restrictions' people), and while I'd love to think there's some shred of conscience deep down that makes them wince away from the reality of the term I think it's more that they're a generation that has grown up on this and have imbibed that "it's reproductive health justice natural human right".

But imagine if the term "oncologist" was used for someone who gives you cancer. That's where we're at here.

"Oh, you work in reproductive health care? So you promote fertility, you help people who want to become parents, you help women through pregnancy to the delivery of a healthy child?"

"No, we promote sterility and defeat fertility, be that temporarily via contraception access or permanently via vasectomies and tubal ligations. We help people not become parents. We help women terminate pregnancies so no living child results we safely dispose of the products of conception, using emergency contraception, medical abortion medication, and surgical abortion".

"How is that reproductive health care?"

"We care for your health by preventing reproduction! After all, studies show abortion is safer than pregnancy!"

IIRC thé vast majority of what planned parenthood does is STD treatments, which is uncomplicatedly reproductive healthcare.

Source

Affiliate medical serviceProportion (%)
STI testing and treatment56
Contraception23
Abortion services4
Cancer screenings and prevention4
Other reproductive health services11
Other services2

But imagine if the term "oncologist" was used for someone who gives you cancer. That's where we're at here.

By your reasoning if the clinic says "plastic surgery" they would have to take away plastic surgery from you.

Well, apart from the pro-life protestors being portrayed as screaming bigots

And literally worse than demons if the blurb you quoted is accurate.

People say abortion, and I perk up. Great! Let's talk Eugenics! Can we abort adults, too? But no, no, it's actually just about letting people screw around and pretend it's free of consequences. I wish we were steely-eyed Übermenschen coldly exercising our power of life and death in order to maximize our competitive edge, but no, in truth we're just a horde of hedonist degenerates who kill babies because foresight, commitment and responsibility get in the way of maximizing our dopamine release. But hey, no problem - just elevate the baby-killing business to a sacred cow of the civil religion and focus on the raped 12-year-old, because that's the modal abortion case, or at least we can pretend as much.

FWIW, I recently read Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, and in there an Abortion scene just went...oddly uncommented. Hard to tell what the author thinks of abortion. Of whether it's a philosophical or political issue for him at all, or just a question of practicalities.

I wish we were steely-eyed Übermenschen coldly exercising our power of life and death in order to maximize our competitive edge

I think the world doesn't have enough high decouplers in charge to let your country in particular voice this opinion again. I can see some African country adopt a Yakub-like ethos and start doing eugenics with little to no outcry if they somehow get rich enough.

I think the world doesn't have enough high decouplers in charge to let your country in particular voice this opinion again.

Well then someone else better step up, because it will need to be voiced sooner or later.

Nonsensical, near AI-written woke novels are not new. They are also rarely best sellers; thé best selling speculative fiction writers are still white men writing books about adventures and fighting, and women churning out ‘young adult’ slop about tomboys having love triangles in a dystopia of large hams.

Paying attention to this is, literally, exactly what they want. In the course of normal human events this novel is read by a dozen activists and the publisher loses money.


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