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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Fuck the GOP. They should be in prison or in a care home at this point; the Maggots especially. We need an entirely new conservative wing that at least gestures at interacting with reality instead of tilting at not even windmills; at this point they are fist-fighting imaginary bugbears.

It turns out you can't run a country based entirely on having a victim complex and a dream, even if you accidently hit on a real grievance like immigration, you need to at some point make contact with the world as it is instead of the world as it makes you feel good.

EDIT: I throw myself on the mercy of the crowd, ya'll caught some blowoff from a mothersday family gathering where all the libed out retired professionals and leftist current graduates were observing the traditional detente, but the foxnews-ite conservatives refused to take a hint to the point where they were exiled to the outer darkness (disinvited from memorial day, such that they might learn.)

I was hanging on by a thread, you don't understand the level of autistic restraint required to not go off on a motherfucker who doesn't know what the word 'litoral' means, but has lots of opinions about combat in that particular zone which she will just not shut the fuck up about. It was BAD guys, I'm not kidding, this is the worst it's been since 2020.

  • -43

We need an entirely new conservative wing

The Dems are the new conservative wing (i.e. Rightists), whether you like what that is or not. "Slam the brakes on every new development, intentionally make sure problems aren't fixed, keep giving power to the bureaucracy like we've done for the last 60 years" is not exactly a liberal thing, though I get that the term's been redefined away from what it used to mean.

GOP are reformers (i.e. Leftists), again, whether you like what that is or not. This is the "bureaucracy has done fine, but the regulations it's demanding are too expensive" people, which... well, looks like they're a natural complement to the new guys who are also saying this. It's more salient now that the US is poorer; those regulations were passed in a richer time.

It turns out you can't run a country based entirely on having a victim complex and a dream

The entire Anglosphere, and Western Europe, literally all do this. Have been for decades. Seems to have worked out well for the Establishment.

(The victim complex and dream is very gyno-centric; "It's Her Turn" and all that.)

Yeah, you’re coming in too hot here.

I guess you're calling specifically for me (a "Maggot") to go to jail so there's no polite way for me to interact with this post. (Anything I say is inherently inflaming tension, no? I don't think the mod response to your comment goes far enough frankly.)

However I would still like to try to politely point out this contradiction: You call for putting MAGA in jail, and then complain that we need people to interact with reality. Imagining that you can roll up an entire political faction and put them all in jail (representing ~30%+ of the country) is obviously political fantasy.

When I find myself thinking like this, I try to go for a walk and read a book and not log on for a day or more so that I can drink some tea and reflect on higher things. Chamomile with honey and glycine helps me dream deeply.

You right, observe the edit.

That said, I do think Trump and co. would be in prison right now in a functional system that didn't provide infinite deference to people once they accrued a certain amount of popularity or capital. If I took documents without the black band on them out of the building they were in I would not see daylight for a LONG time; if I then refused to cooperate with the feds I would 50/50 be fucking dead.

One could argue that this is what already MAGA is, a coalition of the people who "interact with reality" on a daily basis rebelling against the laptop and email class and this is the driver of so many of complaints held by that class. The thing about interacting with reality is that you can just do things.

Trump won because people felt the economy sucked, and because of the border. People try to make US politics more complicated than it is. If people don't like the economy, they vote for the other guy. With gas up 50%, we'll see how the "interacts with reality" thesis holds.

Note that gas is still lower than it was under Biden.

Compared to where gas was at the end of Biden's term, though?

These are not mutually exclusive statements. People who's job is to "interact with reality" on a daily basis, IE cops, plumbers, meat-packers, bus-drivers, retail clerks, Et Al are also the people most impacted by the negative externalities of luxury beliefs like "decarceration" and "open borders".

So long as people don’t have to live with the ideological byproducts and waste generated by the downside of the policies they advocate, they’ll continue to be at liberty thinking up all kinds of fanciful garbage encircled with every halo of bullshit you can think of. You saw this with the hysteria of Martha’s Vineyard and the controversy surrounding that debacle.

It wasn’t just the economy though. People vote just as much along identitarian lines and projected onto Trump the values they sought to find in his statements.

GOP is probably fine electorally for a generation. They should win the gerrymandering wars. And Dems need to moderate on a bunch of issues like law and order and common sense regulations that GOP should be able to hold the 48% of the vote they will need to.

  1. The liberal of my childhood was Sandy Cohen of the OC. He was one of us but “do-goodery”. Mamdani is like an alien to me and most of the power structures in the left now.

  2. Demographics have changed. Politics will be like Brazil for a while. I don’t know if that ever ends but for it to end you would need assimilation into closer to 1990’s norms.

...the fact that Dick Cheney prior to his death voted for her, and Liz’s attempt at getting George W. Bush to endorse Harris shows that there is a significant desire among the moderates of the GOP to escape the influence of Magaist politics.

That will never not be funny to me. The Great Satan of All Great Satans for the liberal side of the equation, Dick "Darth" Cheney, came out in support of the First Ever Female Asian Black President-Presumptive, and then they tried getting Chimpy McHitler to endorse her.

Under what moon did they think this was a winning strategy? Get the guys our party has spent twenty years publicly excoriating as Worse Than Hitler to state "We just love that little coloured girl" and then lose all or most of our own supporters and don't win any of the other side's supporters?

I think the Cheney strategy did not really do anything one way or the other, sorry Liz there went your hopes of being the Token White Gal in the Coconut Queen's administration, but I couldn't believe it then and I still can't believe it now.

The future of the GoP is now.

The post 2020 GoP is essentially a center-right populist party with mercantilist tendencies, and is only remarkable insofar as our intellectual class has strayed so far out into the weeds that moderate center-right politics appear incomprehensible to them.

If anything MAGA can be understood in part as Republicans re-embracing their mid-century role as the big-tent party after spending much of the 90s and early 2000s/GWoT era in the wilderness.

The East-coast populists and Sothern Tea-party coalition allied to wrest control of the party from the old Rockefeller-style corporatists, the Evangelicals started out defending their long-time allies on the corporatist right but their support had been wavering due to perceived betrayals on abortion and LGBTQ issues. 2020 and the lockdowns killed that alliance for good leaving the corporatist isolated from the wider party and they simply didn't have the votes to maintain position on their own. Cheney died and his heirs (both intellectual and biological) found themselves getting primaried. Now the populists are setting the agenda, and while the Evangelicals might grumble about Trump's lack of couth, they appreciate having the populists' support on issues like abortion and school choice.

after spending much of the 90s and early 2000s/GWoT era in the wilderness

The Newt Gingrich surge in Congress in 1994 followed by the GWB presidency from 2001-2009 is "in the wilderness?" That's a lot of power for, literally, "most of' the 1990s and 2000s.

As I said in my post on Cheney,

He could not claim that "Real Neoliberalism/Compassionate Conservativism has never been tried" or that he only got to implement half of his intended foreign policy because the "enlightened centrists" had been given everything they wanted. The plan was tried, and it failed.

We had a solid 20+ years of Democrats being the party of progressivism and Republicans being the party of progressivism-lite and it is the manifest failures of progressivism that lead to the rise of the Tea-Party and the eventual exile of the faction that men like Cheney and Gingrich represented from the party because the GoP actually has a functioning primary system.

The ‘future of the GOP’ discussion is mostly dumb, because the GOP is now thé big tent party and the democrats are now thé ideological party, opposite of mid-late 20th century when ‘I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a democrat.’ was a recognized enough statement to be attributed to more than one person. The GOP going forwards probably won’t have an ideology. Oh, there’ll be principles- support for fossil fuels to name one- but nothing like the democrats, or like Reagan of yore.

Now there’s some advantages to that- it means republicans can be competitive more or less everywhere.

The GOP isn’t really acting like a party which is competitive everywhere. It made gains in coal country, Alaska, and Montana while doubling down on blaming Coastal Elites. Very Trump. I don’t see how that converts into lasting popularity elsewhere.

Trump can’t carry turnout forever.

In 2024 the Republican party increased its performance virtually everywhere in America outside Atlanta and Utah. It's been the subject of some very famous maps

It's possible this is a high-water mark and maybe the GOP is losing and this redshift is all an affect of Trump. In that case I guess you'd be right. But it's not really in evidence. The Democratic Party remains extremely unpopular. Why couldn't a Republican Party sans Trump continue to win, say, a consistent 52-48 national victory.

In 2024 the Republican party increased its performance virtually everywhere in America outside Atlanta and Utah. It's been the subject of some very famous maps

That doesn't mean that the Republican party is building a new coalition that makes it competitive everywhere. It means that the swing was more uniform than is historically normal - in other words that the two coalitions look roughly the same in 2020 and 2024 but with Harris doing worse with swing voters than Biden. If part of your raison d'etre as a movement is mouth-foaming hatred of the kind of society represented by the "Gen Z boss and a mini" video, you don't want to be competitive in the parts of the country where those kinds of people live, any more than the Democrats want to be competitive in redneck country.

Okay, that’s definitely more widely distributed than I was expecting. I know a lot of those counties already went heavily red but the New England stuff is really surprising.

I guess I really do put a lot of it down to Trump.

Trump beat a nearly senile Biden (2024 edition), Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris. Putting forth bad national candidates has a lot of downstream effect during a presidential election year. If the Republican party maintains the trifecta after 26' midterms it would be a sign of continued broad public support.

Trump beat ...Hillary Clinton ... Putting forth bad national candidates has a lot of downstream effect during a presidential election year.

Time to dig this and this out again about who the pundits were saying would win pulling up 😁

(Whatever happened to Hilary Rosen, by the way?)

It was only in hindsight that everyone declared Hillary a weak candidate. In 2015 everyone in America knew that Hillary was probably the next president.

Anyways, Trump isn’t running again. If the theory is Trump is a bad candidate and only beat worse candidates, that bodes well for Republicans. GOP will pick Rubio or JD or DeSantis. Dems will pick…? Maybe they won’t pick a bad candidate for the 4th time running.

It was only in hindsight that everyone declared Hillary a weak candidate. In 2015 everyone in America knew that Hillary was probably the next president.

Everyone in America in 2015 knew that Hillary would be the Democratic candidate because the Clinton machine had stitched up the primary. I don't think Republicans went into the 2016 primary cycle expecting to lose the general - they had a crowded field of superficially-strong candidates and believed (correctly) that Hillary was unpopular with the median voter. The median voter obviously knew this, the Bernie campaign knew it, and the minority of pundits who actually paid attention to public opinion knew it, but couldn't say it without being called sexist by the pro-establishment left peanut gallery.

Hillary then struggled in an uncontested primary, to the point where she ended up shoring up her position by burning the centre-left commons by attacking Bernie from the left on idpol issues (hence the "BernieBro" slur). Apart from the MSM, the main source of left-wing commentary on US politics I was consuming at the time was Crooked Timber which had multiple posts asking the questions "Do Clinton's problems in the primary predict trouble in the general?" and "Just how many voters are there whose top two preferences would be (1) Bernie (2) Trump?"

Counter @Opt-out below, Hillary's defenders repeatedly said that she was the "most qualified candidate" in decades, not that she was the strongest. They knew they were talking about her CV and not her popularity with the voters.

Hillary was the strong horse. She ran an extremely close primary in 2008 against Obama, which was extremely close and made her the obvious next candidate. She had name recognition and the majority of the Democratic Party on board. She was made Secretary of State as her consolation prize, which meant she was effectively one of the most powerful politicians in America. And she had the better part of a decade for the public to accept that she was the most obvious candidate to be the next President of the United States. Seemingly every TV procedural and light fiction had a blonde lady female President. A woman president! She had this mystique too. Hillary was then able to cut deals within the party to ensure the nomination was all but won. (I do believe the wikileaks reveal that Tim Kaine allowd Debbie Wasserman Schultz to replace him as head of the DNC in exchange for being made Hillary's running mate. But there were other deals made as well.) Hillary was qualified, she was experienced, she was successful, she was famous, she was even relatively popular. Secretary of State, Senator, First Lady, consumate politician. Foreign policy, Domestic policy. In the lead-up to the 2015 Democratic Primary she was the obvious obvious frontrunner, which is a big part of why nobody serious bothered to run against her.

In hindsight the weaknesses there were latent. A lot of it probably had to do with Obama fatigue. A lot of it was natural generational turnover. In hindsight the fact that she so truly represented the best of the Washington political class is exactly what made her vulnerable. But she was the best of them.

Bernie's primary challenge having legs was a surprise to everybody. It was probably even a surprise to Bernie, who can't have expected that after two generations in the political wilderness on the fringes that he was finally about to go mainstream. It was a lot closer than anyone would have expected in 2014. But it still wasn't really close.

Meanwhile the Republicans didn't have anybody of Hillary's stature. They had a lot of solid candidates by traditional Washington candidate standards and felt good that after 8 years of Obama it was finally their turn to win. But nobody was really ready for prime time. Jeb was theoretically the frontrunner and big hitter, but he had no strong public persona besides his Bush name. Ted Cruz was alienating and weird. Rubio was young and untested. Then there were all these governors and senators and winsome folk. In hindsight it's obvious that they were all weak and Trump tore through the field like wet tissue. But then it was assumed that Trump himself would lose, easily, and Hillary was the obvious favorite.

And so many things had to go right for Trump to win that it could be called divine intervention. 2016 was one of the most shocking things to ever happen in the lifetimes of everyone who lived through it. Those woke posters who called it the most shocking event since 9/11 were woke-more-correct. Nobody expected Trump to win. You had to be extremely weird to have considered it. Half the country thought Hillary was up by ten, the other half sanguinely thought it would be closer than that but she would probably win. It was genuinely shocking to the whole world, one of those events that makes people peer behind the veil and realize how arbitrary life can be and how you go along and there's a plan and the world is certainly on it and then suddenly everything changes and you can see history being made. TPP, Wikileaks, Comey, Obamacare rates, the border crisis, ISIS, Pokemon Go to the Polls.

Hillary was the strong horse. She ran an extremely close primary in 2008 against Obama,

And then she wasn't the strong horse any more. Strong horses don't lose to 1st-term senators. Hilary should have won the 2008 primary according to the establishment-left and MSM conventional wisdom. It was her first big electoral test - she ended up not facing a serious opponent in the NY senate election after Giuliani pulled out due to a cancer scare. She failed it. And the main reason was fairly obvious as well - she was the public face of the centre-left faction that supported the Iraq debacle (for which she never really repented - this was a key line taken against her by both Bernie and Trump in 2016). Anyone who updated on the 2008 primary knew that Hilary was less electable than the MSM insisted she was. I was around at the time and I remember the difference in tone between the two - the MSM glazing of Obama was (among other things) about him being a once-in-a-generation political talent who could connect with the American people/forge a new centre-left coalition/reconcile black and white Americans. The MSM glazing of Clinton in 2015-6 was about her CV, about how she deserved to win because she was a woman, and about how good a President she would be because of various personal qualities that were not visible to voters. Even Clinton's supporters couldn't say she was unusually popular with a straight face.

Nobody expected Trump to win.

I will give you that - he was an underdog up to and including the eve of poll.

You had to be extremely weird to have considered it.

Trump beating Clinton in the general was a very obvious and visible possibility once he had the nomination. The pundit class refused to consider it, but opinion polls always showed Clinton as a beatable front-runner. Nate Silver had her around an 80-20 favourite for most of the campaign, and about 70-30 on the eve of poll. Hilary's poll lead in 2016 was never as big as Obama's (either time) or Biden's in 2020.

Trump as Republican nominee was obviously possible after New Hampshire, and the most likely outcome after the March 1st SEC primary.

More comments

Nah, Trump is an exceptional candidate (in hindsight of course), the GOP will have trouble filling his shoes. It's just also true that the democrats fielded 3 terrible national candidates in a row. So if the trifecta is maintained despite no terrible democrat on the ballot (and the usual midterms reversals), then the republicans are still in good shape, so long as that wasn't dependent on Trump's charisma.

Agree on Hillary, you only become a weak candidate when you lose. On paper she may have been the strongest candidate to run for office in decades. First women, married to the only widely popular US President (since probably Kennedy?), Senator, Cabinet, educational bonafides.

It's possible this is a high-water mark and maybe the GOP is losing and this redshift is all an affect of Trump.

It's possible this is a high-water mark and the GOP would be losing except that this redshift is all an effect of Harris. She came with a ton of baggage, and couldn't handle the most basic softball attempts to let her disclaim it. She did well enough among California voters, but when the Democrats actually last allowed her to lead a national candidacy she took 15th place, with (not a typo:) 844 votes.

Why couldn't a Republican Party sans Trump continue to win, say, a consistent 52-48 national victory.

In my incredibly biased opinion (registered Republican, but would have gotten drunk enough to vote Harris had I been in a swing state), a Republican party sans-Trump would be much better positioned to keep pulling national victories, but that's not really on the table. What we'll have is a Republican Party post-Trump, a party irrevocably changed by his performance (net approval rating now under -20%), with a back bench full of politicians who've often praised him and who won't be getting softball questions about that. I don't doubt that the Democratic Party can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory here (there's a lot of baggage there too, and it's grimly hilarious that Harris is still #2 on that list by the odds, and their #1 still spends more time than not underwater in national approval ratings), but the ball will be theirs to fumble.

(net approval rating now under -20%)

That's the upper end of the polling for the Democrats, who are less favorable than anyone except Iran.

The reasons are different though: The people who hate Trump hate Trump for doing the things he promised he would do; the people who hate the Dems hate the Dems for not hating Republicans enough. If gruesome newsome came out on stage shirtless smeared in mud and declared he would bite the pancreases out of every republican in congress before drop kicking a goat into a woodchipper, his approval would go UP.

GOP politicians, like politicians in general, have plenty of practice threading the needle with polite non-answers about previous positions. It doesn't matter if they were tied to Trump(just like having denied Biden's senility after he pooped his pants and talked to dead people on live TV is not a liability for democrats in practice). The difference is republicans will select their nominee for being well-spoken and democrats will select their nominee for DEI points.

Its frankly hilarious to me that the Dems are basically stuck with the coalition they built and all its dysfunction because they elevated the AOCs, Kamala Harris', Jasmine Crocketts and Stacey Abrams amongst them, and the most motivated and active parts of their base are all-in on identity politics, so trying to wrest back the controls will require exercises of raw, naked power that is just as likely to bite them in the ass as it is to select a viable candidate.

My biggest fear for the GOP is post-Trump (or the small chance Trump simply declines to leave the stage) power struggles and the constant tendency at infighting at the most inopportune times.

But the GOP now has a deep qualified leadership bench by comparison, and one that isn't (as far as I can tell) beholden to constituencies that will demand the faucet of grift, graft and fraud be kept all the way open or they'll revolt. Which is to say, a GOP official can actually try things that might make things better.

Oh absolutely, the GOP could easily lose the presidency, important races, etc though infighting. But it's unlikely to cede a trifecta to democrats; the GOP coalition is not very ideologically coherent, but it's very suited to the political system we exist in.

From where im standing the GoP seems to have a much more coherant idea of both what it believes and desired path forward than the Democrats do.

They're a center-right populist party with mercantilist tendencies.

Meanwhile the Democrats are currently stuck trying to square the circle of being the party of "anti-racism" and "punch a nazi" with also being the party of art school socialists who believe in the primacy of race and blame Jews/Isreal for all the worlds ills.

The alternative to all-in on identity politics is all-in on socialism, communism, redistribution -- the DSA, basically. Mandami won NYC handily, Katie Wilson has Seattle, Washington State has its new millionaire tax and California its proposed wealth tax which has already driven several billionaires out. At the national level this is mostly represented by fossils like Warren and Sanders, but AOC could make a return to relevance. They've got allies here with some of the anti-boomer right, which would like nothing more than to redistribute the spoils of dispossessing old people of their homes.

The DSA is all-in on idpol too.

Its frankly hilarious to me that the Dems are basically stuck with the coalition they built and all its dysfunction because they elevated the AOCs, Kamala Harris', Jasmine Crocketts and Stacey Abrams amongst them, and the most motivated and active parts of their base are all-in on identity politics, so trying to wrest back the controls will require exercises of raw, naked power that is just as likely to bite them in the ass as it is to select a viable candidate.

There's certainly quite a bit of dark humor to be found in the fact that the DEI party is willing to hurt itself as a way to provide a costly signal that it really does believe in DEI. I just can't help but keep thinking of the trolley problem meme "You can stop the trolley at any time, but in doing so you need to admit that you made a mistake."

The best thing about DEI in my entirely uncharitable opinion is the selection pressure is non-meritocratic. So the more DEI initiatives in politics and corpos succeed, the more unstable and brittle the DEI machine itself will become.

it is quite clear that as of now the USA is in no position to contest the globe with the likes of China or Russia.

...

...I don't think it is 'quite clear' and the case laid out here just takes it for granted.

I'm sorry was there not a whole thing where Russian and Chinese anti-air completely failed to pose a real threat in Venezuela and later in Iran?

Did I hallucinate a whole news story about an incursion into Venezuela without even needing to perform a significant amount of bombing? Last I checked Maduro is still in prison in New York.

Was that not a notable development that suggests that U.S. air superiority is even more lopsided than might have been assumed?

I'm actually asking for a chain of reasoning to explain how you came out of the last 5 months with a higher estimate of Russian and Chinese military efficacy compared to the U.S. than previously. This viewpoint befuddles me.

I don't know what your precise definition of "contest the globe" is but holy cow, if nukes were off the table, how exactly do those countries even show up for the competition, let alone win it convincingly. What exactly is the edge you're giving to them that will outperform demonstrated U.S. capabilities, before discussing the stuff that is as-yet undemonstrated.

Find it annoying to see these posts that basically affirming the consequent by bolstering a given conclusion they've reached (the U.S. failed to completely demolish Iran's nuclear program) then pretending their premise (U.S. military capacity is hamstrung under Donald Trump) without a supporting scaffold of logic. We're barely two years into Trump two, after four years of whatever the hell Biden was, and making bold prognostications about his efforts being failures kind of belies the results we've seen overall.

which’ll hopefully initiate a process of rebuilding for the damages the last decade of Trumpist politics have inflicted on the nation.

Can't help but notice some motivated reasoning there, bub. Especially because there's that glaring interruption in "the last decade" of Trumpist politics that goes utterly glossed over.

Curious to mention Kamala in your post but I do a ctrl+f "Biden" and its empty. Howboutdat.

Anyway, sorry to sound flippant, but it really helps that when you're trying to advance a particular conclusion, you actually back up the premises you're using that are the most controversial or extraordinary, such as "a decade of damages" from Trumpist politics (damage inflicted where? of what magnitude?), or "...that his rule has largely been to the detriment of... America’s relationship with its allies in NATO" (As compared to before? What precisely has deteriorated?).

Anyhow:

Rubio or Vance remain the favorites for winning the 2028 Presidential election Much can change in between, but the assumption that there isn't a viable path forward that actually preserves much of the Trump coalition seems wishful, there's likely a power struggle to come, but all those Trump-backed challengers just blew out a bunch of incumbents in Indiana, so it seems pretty clear where the center of gravity within the GOP lies right now.

Oh, also, on the manufacturing front. Upward momentum after decades of decline... suggests something has changed or improved. Yes, that includes the Rust Belt.

I dunno, this analysis seems to be a little undercooked.

Rubio or Vance remain the favorites for winning the 2028 Presidential election

Taking it by candidate and not by party which has a 60:40 leaning towards Dems is a mistake. The issue here is that Rubio and Vance are considered significantly more likely to be the Republican nominee (64% collectively) than Newsom and Harris (the top two Dem choices at this moment) are expected to be the Dem nominee. (33% chance collectively).

Basically the markets are expecting a Obama/Trump style moment where someone unexpectedly comes in and wins the Dem primary and then goes onto winning the presidency.

I think I take your meaning, but allow me to try and parse this:

The markets are expecting a Obama/Trump style moment where someone unexpectedly comes in

The markets expect that the unexpected will happen. I guess its just a wait and see thing, account for the uncertainty.

And as much as Obama provides good precedent, I think the subsequent years where Hillary and then Biden locked down the nom against upstarts (including Bernie... twice) makes it less likely.

The markets expect that the unexpected will happen. I guess its just a wait and see thing, account for the uncertainty

Yeah. They don't really have an idea who it will be, but Harris and Newsom combined are only 33%. Add AOC and it's 41%.

So basically, it's more likely to be none of the top three candidates than it is to be any of them right now.

Basically this amounts to an expectation that the current 'frontrunners' are vulnerable and some as-yet-uncertain player will succeed in disrupting their runs.

Which I can see as a possibility, but I'm not sure where to look for them.

Generic Dems always outperform real Dems. People tend to imagine a nice Leslie Knope and then flinch at the inevitable Jean Ralphio.

Generic Dems always outperform real Dems.

That we don't know who the specific real Dem will be in 2028 doesn't change that there will be a specific real Dem in 2028, and thus the polling effect of "Generic Dem vs Generic Republican" doesn't really impact the predictions. They're not predicting generic Dem, they're predicting currently unknown specific Dem who will be dealing with specific Dem issues.

Your analysis to me reads so differently from what I hear about American politics from my fellow Americans that, politely, I suspect you are not American or otherwise don't follow American politics that closely. You seem to ascribe great important to events or figures that nobody I know regards as important. (Liz Cheney?)

The result of his tenure as president, both first and second term combined has largely been to the disappointment of many

Trump has within the Republican party extremely high approval ratings. Whose disappointment? Later you cite the desire from Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to have a reformed GOP. Liz Cheney also failed and was decisively rejected by the voters. "There is a significant desire among the moderates of the GOP to escape the influence of Magaist politics". Like the legislators just primaried in Indiana?

Perhaps your analysis that Trumpism has failed is motivated by something other than objective analysis? I mean, when I consult the oracle bones I'm not convinced MAGA will have run of the table after Trump fades, and there are a lot of ways this could all go. But MAGA is also the predominant faction now in the Republican Party, its mantle can easily be taken up by Rubio or Vance, and voters clearly still support it. MAGA is powerful. MAGA is more popular than the moderate faction you imagine supplanting it. MAGA has spent ten years purging the moderate faction. So where are you getting this idea that the moderate faction is about to totally win? From the pronouncements of the moderate faction? From the pronouncements of people who want MAGA to lose?

You see why this looks like wishcasting, yes?

The Japanese radio broadcaster assured me that the Japanese are winning in the Pacific -- it must be true. Let's discuss.

the need for a revitalized GOP, capable of once more cooperating across the aisle with their Democratic counterparts

See what I mean?

I don't see why Republican voters would want to cooperate with the Democratic party, but I can see why the Democratic party would want pliant Republicans again.

the American military has failed

Well I guess if you believe that Trump should be surrendering any day now, although he seems to have had the chance to already. But I have to add that if you are calling the war with Iran a failure and the war with Iraq a success, this is such an inversion of American sentiment that I'm not sure you really are a part of it. Are you aware of being provocative? Consider:

atrophying of the military industrial complex

Nobody in America would judge that the MIC is getting weaker.

the lack of cooperation and involvement with allied countries via NATO

Nobody in America considers NATO all that powerful, frankly.

(Actually, I think if I went around to average Americans and said something like "We could have won in Iran already if the Europeans had joined us" I would get a lot of laughs. The only people who seem to consider the Europeans important in the way you're describing are the Europeans themselves.)

Trump hamstringing the army and navy due to his obsession with “making deals”

So the theory is that Trump is sitting on a big button labeled "Win the Iran War" and hasn't pushed it because he's too nice? He negotiates too much? I think I need an explanation here. The idea is that we are going to replace Trump, who is weak because he is "obsessed with making deals," with a "revitalized GOP, capable of once more cooperating across the aisle"? MAGA is weak because Trump is a failure because he likes making deals, therefore we need a strong GOP that... makes deals with Democrats?

This contradiction seems so damning to me in your entire frame of reference that I'm tempted to delete the rest of my post and just emphasize this. You believe that America should replace Trump and his "making deals" with a "broad, consensus-based politics"? Huh?

Besides this, there is obviously no hunger for that right now in America.

his rule has largely been to the detriment of the country, especially as it pertains to America’s relationship with its allies in NATO

Are you European, by chance?

Bro, you should visit America sometime.

And citing a roster of Democratic talking points concern trolling the guy who just handed them their absolute asses time after time is less than convincing.

Both the far right and far left are locked out of power and fighting themselves. The political coalitions that make up the parties are shifting fast, and no one knows exactly when the cultural music will stop and we'll all be stuck again. But it is my estimation that the political energy and momentum is with the right generally, and bog-standard MAGA specifically. Trump is speed-running the Big List of American Opposition Countries on his way to cement his legacy as the most transformational president since FDR (and perhaps just as damaging). Even if there's a glitch or two, the current state of Ukraine, Israel, Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran are all in much better realpolitik position than when he started. The middle east generally is lining up and making nice. These are not losses for Trump, no matter what Huffpo and NPR say.

All the hysterics are just the old guard losing control of a narrative that gave them cultural and political control for half a century. But nothing is forever.

his legacy as the most transformational president since FDR (and perhaps just as damaging)

Fuck you again, JTarrou, for being a great master of phrase. You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.

The first Trump admin was important for its cultural shift and, frankly, vibes. But what were the major accomplishments? Tax cuts (Republican standard forever) and SCOTUS confirmations (the personal project of Mitch McConnell). Other than that ... not so much.

The second admin has been eventful to say the least. Things are happening and getting done. Now, as your wonderful comment says, is that to an ultimate good or productive end? T-B-fucking-D. There are some clear wins like broad deregulation. The Rubio architected western hemisphere foreign policy may be the biggest sea change since the Marshall Plan. While I broadly agree on your realpolitik assessment regarding the middle east, Trump may have, ironically, done more for the deep antisemitic movement in the USA than Representative Ilhan Omar of Mogadishu Minneapolis. The Tariffs may be a nothing burger macro-economically, but they may have been the last nail in the coffin for disaffected rust belt White Men. You know, the ones who vote 90% for Trump.

After Trump is going to look something like a loose alliance between the Christian Nationalist (I say that endearingly) Josh Hawley's of the country and the neo-neo-con Rubio's. Stuck in the middle will be the MAGA-by-convenience Vances, Hegseths and Patels. The problem with the latter group is that they never actually had a durable or deep political theory to begin with. They're essentially right leaning opportunists.

I worry about the intellectual and "formal" (if that's the right term ... perhaps "institutional") backbone of the GOP. Close political watchers are aware of the current case of Steve Daines, Senator from Montana.

Daines was elected as a Republican Senator in a State that had been solid blue since the 1980s (Montana has a weird union history). During the Biden Admin, he was the head of the Republican Senate Reelection Campaign. His job was to flip the Senate for the Republicans in 2024. He did that, including hand recruiting the other Senator from Montana, Tim Sheehy, who unseated Jon Tester, a Montana native who had been a Democrat Senator since 2007.

After such a successful time at the head of the NRSC, Daines was expected to, perhaps, join the 2024 Trump Admin. At the very least, he could be chair of any committee he wanted. What did he choose?

To retire.

Unexpectedly in March, Daines announced he wouldn't file to run for re-election in what promised to be an absolute Sunday stroll back into his Senate seat.

Daines never grabbed a lot of headline attention but was quietly very influential and a prolific fundraiser. He was also a dyed in the wool Regan era conservative.

Speculating, I wonder if folks like Daines see that MAGA 2.0 is hurdling towards a crack up. Mid-terms are looking bad, although perhaps not as apocalyptic as once thought. But, beyond that, 2028 is looking to potentially setup Little Marco to get down and dirty with J.D. Vance. Is that the divorce that kills the party? Who knows, but I'd bet people like Daines have a strong opinion.

The talk around the water cooler is that Daines is either considering a run himself or gunning for a VP or cabinet slot in 28.

Almes, the man he endorsed as his replacement is a Trump appointed US attorney whose main thing has been cracking down on NGO fraud so make of that what you will.

Much to be seen in the future. I wonder about the anti-semitism though. It's endemic in the middle east, but Trump has managed to get most of the Sunni arab countries to moderate on Israel and many are doing public or private deals, including Saudi Arabia and the new Al Qaeda government of Syria. Something weird is happening, where over half the Palestinians didn't join the last jihad, the Sunnis are mostly out of the mideast terror game, but antisemitism is rising at least publicly in the west. Somehow Iran, the only Shia power, is the last holdout for Sunni supremacy in the Levant, funding the last dead-ender Hamas.

Remember the COVID lockdowns, when billions of school children were confined to their rooms not so much because there was a reasonable suspicion that they were positive, or because they would be competing for ICU beds if infected, but frankly because their freedom was a price the adults were willing to pay to delay the spread of the disease a bit while keeping the economy going?

Contrast with the Hantavirus. Now, I am emphatically not saying that the MV Hondius should have be dealt with using Hegseth's patented double-tap method, even though the utilitarian case seems a bit stronger than for most of his other targets due to tail risks.

But it seems to me that the Hondius should be a Dutch problem, as it is sailing under the Dutch flag. Now, if the Netherlands had cut a deal with Spain to quarantine the people aboard the ship in Tenerife, or even to fly them back to the Netherlands in a charted plane, that would still seem reasonable. Instead, it was apparently decided that the potentially infected people are the problem of their respective states, and they were quickly repatriated (apart from the crew, which is mostly quarantined in Rotterdam because the Philippines were unwilling to just charter a plane to allow their countrymen the luxury of being quarantined on their home soil).

Now, I am an utilitarian. Out of about 200 people on that ship, three have died (so far -- at least another is in 'serious condition'). Without bothering to search for the ages of the victims, let's call it 60 life-years lost (but feel free to refute that). Arbitrarily, let's decide that a life in quarantine has a quality factor of 0.5 (because half the people like Netflix and half would prefer biking instead). Locking up ~200 people for about six weeks each might thus cause a loss of 12 QALYs. The point being that even without considering the the potential for superspreaders, a quarantine would seem proportional.

Yes, containing the cruise ship outbreak would not stop a pandemic if the strain is pandemic-grade, as it is likely endemic in Argentina. However, I do not think this refutes its purpose. You might as well say "sooner or later, that naive tourist walking through the slums will get murdered for his wallet by someone, so I might as well stab him right now".

Culture war angle: different countries are going to handle the quarantine slightly differently:

Greece’s health ministry said a male evacuee will spend 45 days in mandatory hospital quarantine in Athens. Authorities said the man will be placed in a specially prepared negative-pressure chamber at Attikon university hospital.

vs MAHA:

The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, says the 17 Americans and one British national who reside in the US will be flown to the University of Nebraska. At a quarantine facility, their risk levels for spreading the virus will be assessed. After that, they will be given the choice of staying in Nebraska or going home, where their conditions would be monitored by state and local health agencies.

Currently, while some people near me claim that this will be the next pandemic, I am taking the fifth until Scott publishes one of his trademark 'much more than you wanted to know' articles. Long incubation period and high mortality (in humans -- the cute little rodents are fine!) certainly form a nice basis if it evolves to be more transmittable between humans. Of course, the WHO tells us that everything is fine, but these are basically the same people who told us that masks will not prevent COVID. (And the perspective of the other side is not very helpful either -- I would sooner take military advice from Hegseth than I would take medical advice from Kennedy.) On Polymarket, a Hantavirus pandemic in 2026 trades at around 10%. This is obviously limited by the usual effects -- even if you believe that the probability is zero, 10% gain over seven months or so is not that great of a return of investment. It would be useful if there were pandemic bonds traded on the open market (so one could compare their prices to what they are usually), but from what I can tell there are none.

The school closures were useless because by then it was far too late, and even then it was already established the virus was not nearly as deadly as feared especially among young people. For the vast majority of people, Covid was like a bad cold.

if the Hantavirus can be confined to the ship, then a stronger case can be made for quarainte, with appropriate monetary compensation.

On Polymarket, a Hantavirus pandemic in 2026 trades at around 10%. This is obviously limited by the usual effects -- even if you believe that the probability is zero, 10% gain over seven months or so is not that great of a return of investment. It would be useful if there were pandemic bonds traded on the open market (so one could compare their prices to what they are usually), but from what I can tell there are none.

Out of money put options on index funds can also accomplish this. The problem is these tend to be cash incinerators 95-99% of the time. If you throw 1% of your net worth on these , you can make a nice profit if this is a repeat of Covid...a few people did this in early 2020. This is unlikely though, from Google "Hantavirus is generally not highly contagious between people and does not spread like common respiratory viruses such as COVID-19 or flu."

Yes put prices would be a good indicator. And a big reason why you know polymarket market isn’t legitimate or sized. It’s not that 13% isn’t a great return - you could actually easily arb it with index puts. Bet no at 13% and buy a certain amount of index puts with the 13%. Cross collateralize them.
If a pandemic occurs again

  1. I am fairly certain markets crash so long outs would offset (30-year t-bond calls might be even better).
  2. The market might crash without a pandemic. The no bet is ONLY betting on a pandemic (simplistically I assume pandemic = 100% crash)

Or something like sell a long-dated delta positive at-the-money straddle on SPY. This will collect a lot of premium, and then buy the 3 months far-OTM SPY puts, which will be offset by the premium collected on the straddle. If the market tanks, the puts will surge and easily offset the loss on the straddle. The problem is when the puts don't "explode" despite the market falling, due to the greeks not behaving. You would need something like a -5-7% day to get the explosion effect.

More generally, is Polymarket still a reliable indicator of anything at this point? Between direct observations/experiences and a number of high-profile stories about insiders manipulating data sources like ISW, I get the sense that you have to put a nontrivial probability that any market outcome will be determined by shenanigans (of the "the person controlling the obscure WHO website deep link that will be used for resolving is betting too, and nobody will punish him for changing it for 10 minutes" type, or the "a small group of power users knows that on Polymarket 'pandemic' is taken to mean any disease discussed by Andrew Fauci on TV while wearing a pink tie" type) rather than anything resembling a plain interpretation of its subject.

Accordingly, 13% on pandemic could easily be dominated by a signal like "small group of users in the know sees that an account representing resolution manipulators is betting yes, and betting according to their expectation that the market will be successfully manipulated to yes".

Now it fell to 9%. I think it would be easy to manipulate the market due to thin liquidity.

I am emphatically not saying that the MV Hondius should have be dealt with using Hegseth's patented double-tap method

Eh... Anyways, the difference is that for a certain kind of mindset, "punishing" everyone is more acceptable than "punishing" a subset. Yes this is terrible and braindead; no I don't know how to solve it.

You might as well say "sooner or later, that naive tourist walking through the slums will get murdered for his wallet by someone, so I might as well stab him right now".

A utilitarian Argentine government should pay people to at minimum threaten tourists that want to go to the hantavirus garbage dump. They should just kill the birds that seem to be the main attraction.

Currently, while some people near me claim that this will be the next pandemic, I am taking the fifth until Scott publishes one of his trademark 'much more than you wanted to know' articles

I don't really expect it to be the next pandemic, but I don't think a current-Scott will be as useful or forthcoming as any of several eras of old-Scott. Maybe I'm too cynical there, Kelsey's been a bit spicier than she used to be (low bar to hit!), but... should he publish such an article it will be after most useful points. At best we catch a tweet, or if you're closer to him you hear it first or second hand conversationally.

the WHO tells us that everything is fine, but these are basically the same people who told us that masks will not prevent COVID

Current WHO recommendation is that everyone on the ship is high-risk, should be tracked for 42 days minimum, and should wear N95s. This is less than ideal but better than I expected.

COVID was such a complete mess that we never even bothered to do a proper post-incident debriefing report. Nobody even wants to think about what we should do differently next time. A lockdown would have worked in December 2019. By mid-January it was too late.

We should have kept everyone on the boat in the middle of the ocean and resupplied them by helicopter.

The whole thing went from total crisis mode to the virus being a lot less deadly than feared. So interest waned. Also, a deep investigation would implicate the very people doing the investigating ( governments, scientists, agencies, and leaders). I think there is too much stake to want to lay the blame anyone or any party. Let's assume China is at fault--are US leaders going to risk tanking the economy in retaliation? Probably not.

China supposedly succeeded with lockdowns. An autopsy on that would be interesting. Even if true though we never could have done that. And non of the vaccines were full preventative to later mutations.

Honestly an autopsy on their data would be more interesting to me.

Most Asian countries (including Australia) succeeded pre-omicron with broadly the same set of tactics, which did not include nationwide lockdowns.

The key tactics were:

  • Strict border quarantine
  • Effective contact tracing, including both COVID-tracking apps on smartphones and calls by human contact tracers
  • Enforced, compensated quarantine of identified high-risk contacts
  • Temporary, local lockdowns when case counts get high enough to overwhelm the local contact-tracing infrastructure
  • Targetted restrictions on the most risky activities (basically large indoor gatherings) - initially bans, but requiring a same-day negative test once cheap lateral flow tests were broadly available.

The big mistake most western countries made was not doing contact tracing - the UK (and, as I understand it, most other western countries) had a smartphone-tracker app which would tell you when to voluntarily self-isolate. In the UK the app generated too many false positives that could be disconfirmed by manual follow-up, but instead led to people simply ignoring requests to self-isolate. The US got worse results than other western countries because they made additional mistakes, like keeping schools closed longer than necessary and botching the rollout of LFTs.

What’s LFT?

Lateral flow tests.

China supposedly succeeded with lockdowns.

If they did, one wonders why they deemed it necessary to lock down entire cities of millions of people at the drop of a hat – in 2022. And by "lockdown", I mean millions of people who were physically unable to leave their apartment buildings, with food supplied via drone.

why they deemed it necessary

They knew it was a lab originated critter, had no qualms about putting down the authoritarian hammer yet they too were unsure of how bad it was going to get, thus the panicked response.

I'm not asking why China locked down entire cities. I'm asking why, if China supposedly succeeded in stopping the spread of COVID using lockdowns, they were still locking down entire cities more than two years after the virus was first discovered.

Omicron was more infectious (and less deadly) than wild type/alpha/delta. China had a set of effective controls that could maintain zero COVID with the earlier strains, but failed once omicron reached them. The city-wide lockdowns were trying to suppress omicron by doing the same shit harder, whereas in the West even the zero COVID crowd gave up at that point and pretty much every country except China and New Zealand (which was sufficiently remote that they could contain even omicron at the border) let omicron rip. (It helped that we had a vaccine that mostly worked and the Chinese didn't).

We should have kept everyone on the boat in the middle of the ocean and resupplied them by helicopter.

My first instinct was to just firebomb it but your plan sounds a lot more humane. OTOH, how do you decide when to let them come back from sea? Given the long incubation hantavirus could circulate on the boat for years, right? At some point the people confined there have an incentive to lie about positive tests being negative?

A lockdown would never have been an effective means of controlling COVID, for the simple reason that, unlike SARS, it spreads asymptomatically.

There will never be a covid postmortem, because a postmortem would end with ‘and the information to know that this is a terrible strategy was available in March, before we embarked on it, thé experts were often lying, thé western vaccines were delayed for no reason, and needless social damage was done despite everyone in a decision making position knowing full well there was no need for that’.

Is Hantavirus that much of a big deal? There were a bunch of scares, Nipah and Marburg and monkeypox and H5N1 that turned out to be not such a big deal. Everyone is just a bit scared since COVID and so the media will amp that right up.

I know degens on 4chan have already anthropomorphized and sexualized the hantavirus like COVID before that but we should probably be fine? They panic about everything, real or imaginary.

Nevertheless anyone who comes down with a novel strain of disease should be strictly quarantined IMO, not flown around the world to max out infectivity.

odds are it's not a big deal. It's not nearly as contagious of Covid.

If you mean that literally: what odds do you have in mind?

polymarket is giving a 9% odds of pandemic in 2026. I would put my odds closer to 1-2%. Unlike Covid, it's not spread through breathing. it requires exposure to fecal matter

How could it become a pandemic, then? Do you give it 1-2% chance because of the chance it could mutate? (Or already did mutate, we just don't know it yet)

That is why the odds are not zero. 2% seems right for tiny possibility of mutations or unforeseen

If you get hantavirus it's a huge deal. But you won't get it. It just doesn't spread that easily among humans. "There are hantavirus cases!" has been true (nearly?) every year, in the continental US; this one is just special because it was in sufficiently cramped conditions that it infected more than just like one guy sweeping up contaminated mouse droppings without an N95.

https://www.nmhealth.org/data/view/infectious/890/

It's also Andes virus, a strain known for human-to-human transmission, rather than the North American Sin Nombre virus, which is not. (It's called Sin Nombre because two proposed names based on where it was first found didn't pass political muster)

That's an important distinction, but it looks like the resulting epidemiology still isn't much different? Wiki claims the Andes strain is about 1/6 of the human hantavirus cases in Argentina, which would mean it's been responsible for roughly a couple dozen cases a year since the mid-90s. Having a dozen cases in the same cruise ship is creepy, and maybe it means this'll end up on the list of otherwise-obscure diseases that turn into serious risks in crowded semi-confined ship/barracks/dorm conditions, but it still doesn't look like the "first zoonotic/lab-leak appearance in humans, followed by exponential doubling in the general population every few weeks" we saw from Covid.

Is Hantavirus that much of a big deal?

No.

Among other things it has a much smaller window of H2H transmission.

This isn't even a novel hantavirus. It's Andes strain.

As we all know, no virus that is slightly transmissible between humans could ever mutate to become more transmissible between humans.

Or a virus that's slightly harmful to humans could mutate to become more deadly. As has happened. If you worry about all of the possibilities, you'll never stop worrying.

There was the time I cleaned out a closet full of dead mouse bodies without a mask, and then people said: you shouldn't do that, mouse droppings carry diseases! I have now mildly updated towards not doing that in the future.

That’s been common advice for voles locally for decades because the only native hantavirus is transmitted by vole droppings. It isn’t deadly but can be nasty, particularly if you have any kidney issues and applying basic precautions is so easy that you’d have to be a stupid not to take them (ie. wear a mask).

Remember the COVID lockdowns, when billions of school children were confined to their rooms not so much because there was a reasonable suspicion that they were positive, or because they would be competing for ICU beds if infected, but frankly because their freedom was a price the adults were willing to pay to delay the spread of the disease a bit while keeping the economy going?

I don't, because that isn't what happened. Certainly, we shouldn't have closed down schools; I think it was an extremely irrational thing to do which will prove to have had lasting negative repercussions on a generation of children. But the reason we did so wasn't because of a cynical desire to boost the economy at all costs, but rather because people were panicking about the virus and were desperate that Something Be Done. Many, many people were completely unwilling to consider any course of action except for the maximally safe one, and so we closed down the schools even though I don't think there was ever a significant risk to leaving them open.

Eh, schools were most likely going to close regardless of what people wanted. Staffing shortages were happening nationwide during COVID. Without enough bus drivers, you can't get kids to school. Without the teachers, they just sit in the auditorium on their phones after being shuffled around from overpacked classrooms (real story I remember reading in like mid 2021). Without the cafeteria workers, they can't make enough lunch. Not enough maintenance workers means things breaking. Etc etc.

Staff shortages were so bad that some school districts were going back to remote learning at least as late as Jan 2022. And even in Mar 2022, multiple states were deploying the national guard to work as substitutes. Some areas were even taking police officers off the beat in order to work as substitutes.

It's easy to say in retrospect "we should have opened the schools" but it wasn't easy at the time. Even the schools and states that were trying to reopen kept having to fall back to remote or fail somehow else.

I’m reminded of when Covid hit Finland in early March 2020 and within a week everything shut down (except workplaces that couldn’t go remote, stores and so on of course).

That had nothing to do with any government decisions. You can’t exactly run eg. a restaurant when 95% of your customer base disappears overnight. Business owners were outright begging for official restrictions because then they could at least apply for some types of benefits.

One industrial equipment manufacturer was in the news for major furloughs right in the beginning. The catch: They did that two weeks before things shut down locally because their international customers had already canceled or delayed so many orders due to general disruption in the far east.

The things you identify would be a change in US culture. And particular blue state third-worldism. Florida reopened their schools in the fall. I agree closing the schools for the spring semester probably had to happen. Too many older teachers and figuring out how to give some people an out. The staff shortages are just the same issues blue states always have. They fail at providing public goods.

Nobody is saying in “retrospect”. Many states did reopen. Many people said as it was happening that we should open the schools. Or at a minimum some form of hybrid to accommodate some staff with immune issues.

The staff shortages are just the same issues blue states always have. They fail at providing public goods.

Greg Abbott had created a task force specifically about their staff shortages in Texas in 2022. In Oklahoma, they used employees across various state agencies as substitutes.. In Iowa many schools have moved to (and many are still at!) four day school weeks. And here's a story from 2024 about Florida still dealing with staff shortages of teachers, bus drivers and substitutes.

In specifically Florida, the shortages were so bad that they had to draw substitutes from non traditional sources. One district even emailed the parents asking for them to step in as substitute workers. Some shortages are still ongoing! Like last year some parents were dealing with delays in school bus pickups due to shortages of workers

  1. Honestly the school week probably should be 3-4 days a week like college. It’s more efficient.

  2. Those areas did open

  3. Do you even read your own links? Florida is quoted as paying $10-13 an hour for substitutes. Or just google a bunch of links for staff shortages? If this was important they could hike pay. You can make double walking into a Chipotle.

Florida schools perform fine so it’s probably not a real issue. Though the demographic adjusted stats don’t account for Flordia Hispanics being white Europeans while California is filled with Amerindians.

Do you even read your own links? Florida is quoted as paying $10-13 an hour for substitutes. Or just google a bunch of links for staff shortages? If this was important they could hike pay. You can make double walking into a Chipotle.

Yes that's basic economics. Having to raise your pay in a shortage is the default thing expected in a shortage. Supply goes down but demand stays the same = price goes up. That doesn't change that supply went down.

This was about pandemic caused shortages of labor. Not states refusing to hire workers.

Your articles come closer to proving my point by Bayesian logic. You went google searching for “teacher shortage” and the best articles you could find were school districts offering wages 50% of no-skill wages which is essentially no different than just deciding not to hire.

It’s like saying I want a Ferrari and my bid is $15k. I don’t actually want a Ferrari.

This was about pandemic caused shortages of labor. Not states refusing to hire workers.

If workers currently cost X part of the budget, and then a supply shock causes them to cost 1.5x the budget in order to maintain the same quantity of workers, then it is a problem of shortages. Price is the result of supply and demand. Yes you can pay more to help make up for the shortage and get new supply, but that you have to pay more is because of a supply shock.

The same way if you were to buy cheese every week for 2 dollars and then suddenly a disease spread through the cows and less cheese could be made this year and it now cost 4 dollars. Yes you can pay more to get the same amount of cheese for yourself. There is still a cheese shortage.

More comments

OK, this bears repeating, even though I thought everyone knew the point of the US public school system is not education. It has many purposes to many different people; social engineering(mainly by shifting the default choice for middle class women away from 'housewife' rather than anything to do with the students, it's not good enough at indoctrination for that- although it has been in the past), free daycare, giving older kids something to do other than being rowdy, etc. Hell some of it is just very expensive signaling. But 'actually educating kids', let alone doing so efficiently, falls very low on the list of priorities, and US school systems which prioritize it over all these other goals(creating employment demand for college educated women, warehousing teenagers where they'll be less annoying, etc) perform much better than public schools.

50% agree. It’s primary mission is still education at a minimum it’s what drives the economy getting the top 20% educated and into the professional class.

But yes it does all that other stuff. And in certain areas the education part is the least important. Assimilation use to be important but we seem to have given that up.

As far as Covid goes staff shortages were not important for educating. A reduced schedule with off-day homework accomplishes that.

The top 20% would be educated regardless- their parents can afford private school.

The system panics when teachers aren't going to get paid, when the free daycare isn't being provided it's a big deal, job cuts are a horrible tragedy, but when the kids don't learn it's a shrug and a demand for more money- interventions to provide school lunches during the summer, even outside of the school setting, are very welcomed by the system. Interventions to educate kids better are not.

Sûre, there’s a shortage of school workers- but there’s also a general labor shortage, and schools don’t pay exceptionally well(especially in non-teacher roles, school maintenance and driving and nursing roles pay much much less relative to skill set and qualifications than teaching does). That doesn’t distinguish schools from thousands of other things that did reopen on time.

Well some things are better at reopening under capacity than others. A hardware store might be able to handle 3/4th the workers by just letting some tasks go undone and having customers not served as fast. But a school with 3/4th the teachers means classrooms getting crowded, and especially with younger children who are gonna be more rowdy and energetic in general, harder to control. Likewise 3/4th the cafeteria crew and all of a sudden you don't have enough food being made in time for the children or food safety requirements aren't being met. If it's not too bad, you can get away with just telling the few kids at the end "sorry we out of X, gotta have Y" but it doesn't have too much leniency. Schools are still making up for staff shortages in this way. Large bus driver shortages mean kids don't get to school but the smaller bus driver shortages just mean some kids get to school 40 minutes later.

But still there's only so much that can be worked with, especially when dealing with the young children and legal requirements that politicians were hesitant to change over temporary issues, that during the height of COVID they just didn't have much choice.

Also to, beat a dead horse, closing schools is not confining kids to their rooms. At least in the US. It's not enough that people in Australia were under house arrest, we must pretend that was the case everywhere.

That's... not what happened in Australia.

During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on. I think our covid response was over-enthusiastic and proved to be stronger than was necessary, but foreigners have a completely distorted picture of what happened here.

Australia is federal and used targetted lockdowns and external and internal border controls to (broadly successfully) maintain zero COVID in unaffected areas - my understanding is that @sarker's comments would be permissible exaggeration in the case of Melbourne but false as applied to almost anywhere else in Australia.

@OliveTapenade - where in Australia were you?

Okay. I exaggerated. In reality, NSW and Victoria residents (over half the country) were only permitted to be within 5km of home (unless the Melbourne night curfews were in effect).

During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on

Jesus Christ, this is the bar? You know there are people serving actual prison sentences that have that same amount of freedoms, i.e. brief leaves on weekends and access to commissary?

brief leaves on weekends

I think Olive meant being able to go for walks at any time.

Late answer but in Paris, where I lived during most of the pandemic, there was a curfew at 6 pm, after which you were not allowed to leave your house without a valid reason (medical emergency, work, etc.) Your daytime movement was also heavily restricted to 1 hour at a time, and within 1km radius of your apartment. You had to fill out and sign a specific form clarifying your reason for being outdoors every single time you left your home.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-france-requires-form-leave-house-walk-shopping-2020-3

I assume it maybe wasn't quite as extreme in Australia, but in Paris we most certainly could not leave home to go for walks at any time.

Agreed. What most frustrates me about Covid talk on The Motte is the insistence that there were only ever two situations in the western countries: a full lockdown or the Swedish "let's do nothing"-approach. As if my country (you know, right next door to Sweden) with zero legally mandated "lockdowns" but a bunch of voluntary recommendations and public health response changes didn't exist.

I kept track of restrictions during the Covid era and the only government mandated ones were restrictions to large events, bars, restaurants and gyms. Everything else was voluntary (including bar / restaurant closures when the pandemic started) or just recommendations with no penalties. The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".

I've looked into the swedish response back during Covid and as far as I can see, they did mostly the same: They made a lot of recommendations to minimize social contact, they just didn't force you. And this worked: If you look, for example, into mobility data such as usage of trains and subways, it went down just the same as other large cities across the west.

The big problem with mandated legal lockdowns such as the UK and germany, both of which I'm more directly familiar with due to having lived in both and having family & friends in both, was their pointless tyranny and nonsense rules. I have a friend who got a massive fine in the UK. His crime? He took a walk with his flatmates through a forest - which was further than his allowed distance. He lived in central London of course, so he was allowed to take walks there. I, too, got told to move along and go home again in the UK. I was sitting on a park bench in a mostly-empty park reading a book.

Germany I at least didn't experience any problems going outside - but I was deliberately living in the countryside with my parents & girlfriend. My mom constantly reminded us, every time we technically were breaking the law, such as driving too far from home or staying outside too long or whatever. The situation in the cities was, of course, very different. Plenty of friends barely left their rooms and actually got stopped and controlled by police when they did, getting questioned to make sure they had legitimate reason to be outside.

Not to mention the insanities on the day care and school system and their still-lingering effects. Frequent & long closures threw back parents and children months to years in their career and education, respectively. Worse, the new culture of 1) always taking sick leave no matter how weak a cold is and b) always having to stay home two extra days after the cold passed "to be safe" is still on the books in many places and makes everything unworkable insofar as people actually follow the rules.

Again, my mom is a day care worker herself and she is extremely pissed about her younger coworkers constantly taking sick leave, always for a full week. She is staying even when seriously sick, because otherwise it would mean all the parents who depend on them couldn't work. This is still going on. Our own daycare also still has these rules on the book, and a few of the workers do seem to take advantage, but at least not as many. Several of our friends with older kids tell similar stories of schools with constant "teacher shortfalls" which are entirely due to teachers constantly taking sick leave by sticking to the letter of the current rules.

The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".

Good for y'all. The US version was that public parks that had gates were chained shut, people were fined for going to the beach, etc. In the UK your neighbors would snitch on you for being outside.

Yes, US and UK were retarded about it. That does not mean that the only options were "do nothing" or "be completely retarded" and we have examples of western nations that had generally sane responses that didn't involve locking everyone indoors or forcibly shutting down workplaces but also didn't literally tell people to go out to bars and restaurants (which Sweden did in 2020 spring) or keep elderly and other high risk groups during the highest case peaks without masks or any visiting restrictions.

In my state of Washington they banned fishing. Not congregating with others to go fishing, fishing in general. Casting a line off of your own dock was illegal for awhile.

Sweden did great if you look at excess deaths over a two year period. And no, it wasn’t because everyone stayed home.

I don't, because that isn't what happened. Certainly, we shouldn't have closed down schools;

I'm not sure when it should have been clear to the authorities that prepubescent children were very low risk, not only for serious illness but also for transmission. By the start of the new school year in autumn 2020, and probably earlier, it was obvious to intelligent onlookers that you could have reopened schools up to age ~14 with negligible additional transmission (and of course high schools should have reopened once the vaccine was available to teachers and pupils who wanted it). But my memory of the public conversation at the time was that people were incapable of grokking that virus spread is based on physiology and that teens are physiological adults, not 'children'. The logic of "15-year-olds can spread the virus (which they could, even if they were not going to get life-threatening symptoms), so 'children' can spread the virus, so we need to lock down 7-year-olds" was irrefutable in both policy-world and normie-world.

The US (though not other countries) did a particularly bizarre thing where many states kept the schools closed long after entertainment venues and suchlike had reopened. Education Realist had some excellent posts on the politics of this - the reason is that it wasn't establishment COVID panicans keeping the schools closed, it was a coalition between the teachers' unions and every parent demographic that didn't trust the government apart from the red tribe COVID minimizers.

The U.S. was not monolithic. Red states reopened schools pretty early (with much condemnation from the prestige media and the democrats). This includes high schools (which again costs of closures did not justify any benefits from closure). Red states did just fine compared to blue states.

But the NEA got a lot of perks for their members and the NEA is stronger in blue states. COViD was an excuse for the NEA to extract value.

Schools weren't closed for the children, they were closed for the faculty. The public school educator and management class is dominated by progressive anxiety superspreaders.

A simple argument against gun control.

For context here, they are playing chess.

Mr. Terrific: I’m trying to map the multiverse. There are infinite Earths, each with their own history based on choices our other selves have made.

Mr. Terrific: So what do you need?

Superman: More of your T-Spheres.

Mr. Terrific: May I ask why?

Superman: I want to get rid of guns.

Mr. Terrific: For use around the world 24×7, you’d need to replicate the T-Spheres on a massive scale.

Superman: I’m only concerned about one. Actually, while we designate our Earth “Earth One,” it stands to reason that our other selves would do the same. Interesting, don’t you think?

Mr. Terrific: Still, you could never get rid of all the guns.

Superman: But most. You know we could.

Mr. Terrific: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. People would resent us.

Superman: And they’d be alive to do that. Check. Think of the lives we’d save.

Mr. Terrific: Check. Smoking.

Superman: What?

Mr. Terrific: Cigarettes kill far more people. People keep smoking even though they know what’s killing them. Their families can only watch them die, and you want to save lives?

Jail everyone who smokes. Check.

And imprison anyone who speeds. Traffic fatalities are huge. Check.

Lock up everyone who leaves a dangerous dog unchained. Check.

Finally, we kill anyone who doesn’t recycle. Checkmate.

Superman: You’re not going to help me, are you?

Mr. Terrific: No sir, I am not.

I find this reasoning really interesting, because Mr.Terrific points out how selective much of the things that are being banned for killing people actually is.

Here are some other weapons that are banned or restricted in certain states in the US, and some countries:

Switchblades, butterfly knives are banned in places like the UK, and in some states like Minnesota & Massachusetts.

Brass Knuckles are banned in about 20 states, also in the UK and Canada.

The real issue I have with these bans and restrictions on guns, and even brass knuckles or knives, is that, the outrage seems to be selective. You can probably find pocket knives that'll do the job stabbing someone to death fairly easily, you could do it with a hunting knife or a kitchen knife. You could beat someone to death with a baseball bat, (or hell, you could make brass knuckles out of some nuts from Home Depot). And as stated, some of these kill far more people than other things, that are actually meant to harm, per the fbi, a kitchen knife has likely killed more people than brass knuckles have (for this, we'll say brass knuckles would probably fall into the "blunt objects" category). And as stated by Terrific, smoking kills far more than guns.

Perhaps the argument here is just to say: Look, bro, hunting knives - tobacco - cars, etc, aren't meant to kill people, so we aren't as interested in targeting them, but thats not personally how I judge (or others) would judge these situations. If I have a psychopath, who stabs someone to death with a kitchen knife vs one who does it with a switchblade. I'm not looking to judge them off the murder weapon in a trial. The dead person before me is what actually matters. Why should we care about the means of death? Its the ends that we are passing judgment for.

Issue with this type of argument is that it's rare to find people who are actually consistent. The US right now is bombing and killing accused drug traffickers by referring to them as terrorists. For what? For providing a substance that irresponsible people willingly choose to inject into themselves.

Guns at least have the excuse that the user can be killing others. Drug users are only killing themselves! Basically every single drug death are suicides by the irresponsible drug users, whether on purpose or on accident. People may feel shameful if their father or brother or daughter or whoever ends up as a druggie and ODs, but at least it was their fault unlike a murder. There's not many cases of someone being held down and injected with drugs against their will, that's not a thing that happens. Although if we wanted to go with that, the Sacklers could be hanged! Now that's the same thing with gun deaths, a pretty substantial portion of them are suicides too but again at least one could pretend that it's only about the murder tool aspect of them.

And what about lesser harms? Why should we not start rounding up Nestle and Coca Cola shareholders for victimizing poor Americans with obesity, because offering high sugar snacks and drinks is damaging their health. Why should we not be executing the corn and sugar farmers for mass crippling >100million Americans and damaging their health? In total cumulative damage, one could probably argue the sugar farmers and fast food and grocery stores have done more than the entire drug trafficking market just because of the overwhelming amount of people who are overweight now.

Tabacco in raw numbers kills more than 6.5x more Americans a year than fentanyl!

Tobacco use is responsible for over 480,000 deaths per year in the United States,

And at least some of those are from second hand smoke so even tobacco has a stronger argument for "it kills other people" then the drugs these traffickers we're calling terrorists often provide. Why not drone strike the tobacco companies and ban cigarettes then?

Marijuana of course is one of the best examples of this, being arguably safer than federally allowed products like tobacco and alcohol. I ain't ever hear of someone dying of marijuana poisoning like what can happen with an alcoholic!

The US right now is bombing and killing accused drug traffickers by referring to them as terrorists. For what? For providing a substance that irresponsible people willingly choose to inject into themselves.

I'm not sure we should use the current US government's legal arguments as an example of conventional beliefs! Are European governments calling drug dealers terrorists in order to justify lethal, war-like force?

The logic behind calling them terrorists is that the profits generated from selling those drugs (allegedly) go to funding terrorism. Seems like regulated legalization would be more effective at solving that problem but the point is that it doesn't have to do with the voluntary harm to the users.

One thing I’d point out is that marijuana can severely exacerbate latent schizophrenia and causes psychotic breaks in a small but relevant portion of the population. Several noteworthy recent murders in the UK have been the result of marijuana-induced schizophrenia.

In general drugs do impose severe externalities on others.

Even if it's directly causing the schizophrenia and not some kind of selection effect, is it still enough to be anywhere near equal the amount of harm that tobacco or alcohol causes?

I'm not sure how marijuana is supposed to be less harmful than alcohol? It's not like driving stoned is safer than driving drunk, and marijuana is also very bad for the teen brain.

driving stoned is safer than driving drunk

There are people who believe this. I've heard it argued in person. And I've smelled weed smoke wafting out of open moving car windows.

I’ve also seen people pouring out their big gulp and replacing it with beer at 1 in the afternoon. Plenty of people still drive drunk.

It's not like driving stoned is safer than driving drunk

I'd be astonished if it weren't.

All depends on the dose and your tolerance. i got high precisely once in my life and refuse to touch the stuff based on that experience. It would never occur to me to drive in the state I was in.

Alcohol, on the other hand, as long as you didn't drink too much, seems relatively safe. I think there was even a Mythbuster's episode when they were comparing it to driving while sleep deprived, and the latter can easily be more dangerous.

depends on the dose and your tolerance

Yes, of course. And it's not apples to apples in terms of 'level' of inebriation; they're different beasts.

But having experience with both, the trouble with alcohol is that it makes it difficult to judge how impaired you really are. Whereas with thc, you're highly-aware of your state and if anything much more likely to drive much slower than usual if not pull over for a while.

This is because of our MADD DUI thresholds. Get someone to 0.08 and maybe they're a little less alert and a little less cautious, but not really out of the range of sober drivers. Most fatal alcohol-involved collisions are at twice that, though.

The caricature of stoned drivers is they wait for the stop sign to turn green. Based on the drivers I've seen in cars stinking of weed (that I could smell from my own car), they drive very erratically but not fast. I wouldn't be surprised if their most common accident was just driving off the road with no or minor injuries, but I'm not aware of any studies.

The caricature of stoned drivers is they wait for the stop sign to turn green

In my experience, stoned drivers exercise what seems like a superabundance of caution because they feel like everything around them is happening too fast and they can't quite keep up. So they go very slowly; sit at stop signs a very long time to make sure no one is about to come. Check every direction five times, etc.

While it's not ideal, it occurs to me as closer to 'silly' than 'reckless'. Should be avoided either way ofc. But someone on weed, unlike someone on alcohol, doesn't wake up the next day to find dents they don't remember or a mailbox in their grille.

This is the key point. If both sides are arguing from principle and you can expect logical consistency from both, then Mr. Terrific's argument makes perfect sense; at a certain point you have to decide where the line is drawn. Superman wants to draw that line. Mr. Terrific does not agree, but he won't help him draw that line.

Except consistency and principles are not worth jack in the real world; they are specific weaknesses to be attacked and exploited. Pro-gun people want guns because they don't trust anti-gun people, or people in general, and they want the ability to shoot them if they defect. Anti-gun people don't want pro-gun people to have guns because they don't trust pro-gun people, or people in general, to have guns, and they want them to be disarmed and powerless especially if they're from the other political side.

Whatever side can do to hurt and cripple the other side is the point, whatever they say to try and justify it is noise. The current state of affairs where people whine about it and bandy about the laws as if they have any real ability or desire to enforce the laws is awful, but as long as the cities of America aren't engaged in open urban warfare against their political opponents, I'm optimistic. Vigilante assassinations or edge cases aren't quite there yet, and if we escalate to shooting wars the anti-gun side will suddenly find a lot of excuses to be pro-gun and discard what principles made them think guns aren't necessary.

Selling drugs and having people use them voluntarily is a classic case of someone doing something that creates bad incentives, and libertarians being unwilling to do anything about it because people respond to the incentives voluntarily. I find this to be a serious flaw with libertarianism.

You can believe we should ban drugs, doesn't change that people are inconsistent here. The same exact statement can be made here but even worse with plenty of other stuff we have legally.

Selling drugs guns and having people use them voluntarily kill others involuntary is a classic case of someone doing something that creates bad incentives,

If we're cool with something that helps kill others way easier and putting it on the sole responsibility of the user, why not the thing that only kills themselves?

Because compared to guns, a huge proportion of drug uses are bad cases. If the proportion of people who abused drugs were the same as the proportion who abuse guns, there would essentially be no drug problem.

Also, guns are in the Constitution and drugs aren't. If you want to ban guns, get the Constitution amended first.

A government with the power to perfectly engineer incentives and internalize externalities according to your values necessarily has the power to engineer them according to your enemy's.

The thing is they're willing to do things about it, like expel or shun druggies to leave them to rot off on account of their own bad choices, or sell them drugs laced with poison and plainly advertised as such.

But people call this cruel and illegal despite being voluntary solutions to align incentives. Pointing to a deeper disagreement.

I think the whole argument around what should and should not be banned is often overcomplicated. At it's root its about simple tradeoffs: Could you ban kitchen knives? Sure, but the costs would be immense since people actually need kitchen knives (or some other equally dangerous tool) to do productive work. Could you ban tobacco? Sure, Australia is doing it. However many people see that as overreaching since smoking in private only affects one's own health. So many countries ban smoking in public places but allow it in private. Hunting rifles are fairly analogous to kitchen knives, except not everyone needs one since not everyone hunts. But why shouldn't you ban weapons that are easily concealable, much more destructive or have some other bad property that doesn't increase their productive use?

From where I am standing (in Europe) there are two arguments for gun rights in the US. 1. You can't take away all the weapons regardless. A gun ban would just lead to all the most law-abiding people giving up their guns while every single criminal can easily have access. 2. Guns intended to kill people are used as a substitute for inadequate policing, for example in cases of long response times in rural areas. Both arguments make sense to me but neither makes me enthusiastic about living in a country with relaxed gun laws.

But why shouldn't you ban weapons that are easily concealable, much more destructive or have some other bad property that doesn't increase their productive use?

Many of these weapons can also be used for self defense. My ex girlfriend has a revolver at home that she actually had to use once to protect herself from sexual assault. I think if one lives in a dangerous area or is particularly vulnerable having a concealed weapon is beneficial.

Absolutely, that makes perfect sense from an individual perspective. From a top-down perspective I would say that "dangerous areas" are a symptom of inadequate policing and/or other societal problems that should be solved. Also would a less concealable weapon be less useful for self defense?

Given how reducto-ed this argument is, here I present the opposite direction reducto:

(That whole exchange replicated here):

I agree. That's why every American should be issued a Minuteman III ICBM at birth. With it's reduced capacity magazine of a single 300ish kiloton warhead; it is a reasonable deterrent against someone wandering over your property line or getting too angry on the road.

Do you not like the idea of every US citizen being able to instantly vaporize 1 square kilometer anywhere on earth? They already have access to knives and heavy rocks and such, why should we care about the means of Death? Its the ends that we are passing judgment for, in this case the ends being every small town in america instantly being vitrified the first time some chud gets fighty in the parking lot of the shitiest of it's three bars.

The argument from general effect just doesn't work for arms control, because it comes packaged with the response "So you think I should be able to buy a Mk19 40mm grenade launcher with the 48 grenade belt and mount it on top of my corolla? No? So much for freedom!"

If the argument is "X amount of rando civilians getting ventilated is the cost of freedom, counting or not counting gang violence?", that is a respectable axiomatic stance that I might hold, given how I got that thang not on me but safely stored unloaded in a floor mount safe with a box of desiccant packets I've collected from various food bags over the years.

I'm pro gun rights, but I think there are meaningful distinctions between some of the the things mentioned and guns.

Smoking is mostly dangerous to the person doing it. Yes, yes, there's secondhand smoke, but if you're not frequently around smokers while they light up, it's not that much of a concern. Generally, little-l liberal paternalism is okay with "victimless crimes", and tobacco smoking is pretty close to a perfect example of this. You can't even make the socialized healthcare case against smoking, since it actually saves taxpayers money by killing people early.

Speeding is already illegal. However, traffic laws rely heavily on voluntary compliance with the law, since there aren't enough police in the world to catch all the people speeding. In theory, traffic cameras can also solve this issue, but if there were too many traffic cameras, people might genuinely get up in arms about it. Generally speaking, we are dealing with a bunch of trade offs when it comes to traffic laws, and it is unclear that "lock up anyone who speeds" is the best all around solution for society as a whole.

I also think we generally do make pet owners responsible for injuries and damage that are done by their animals. Tort law probably already covers a lot of the things we'd want from a legal code that deals with dangerous animals.

Smoking is mostly dangerous to the person doing it.

Superman argued that people will resent having their guns confiscated, but they will be alive to resent it. That's a blatant claim that guns should be taken away from people for the benefit of those same people.

Not really. If A and B both want guns, and there’s a possibility of at least one of them shooting the other but no possibility of them shooting themselves, they will still be safer without guns, no?

It's kind of funny that superman's position basically can be used to justify the evil government plots of the Xman series.

The original was better.

If I have a psychopath, who stabs someone to death with a kitchen knife vs one who does it with a switchblade.

If you have a psychopath with a machine gun (or a truck in a tightly packed crowd) then that's a lot more of a problem. The answer is to get rid of the psychopaths, terrorists, enemies, criminals, feral hogs, pit bulls... Not the guns, trucks, drones, fertilizer, chemicals, knives...

In the 18th and 19th centuries they'd go on about good governments bringing Improvement, how obviously you're supposed to drain swamps and irrigate the land and develop agriculture and industry. That was what civilization was all about. We should be continuing with Improvements today rather than just redistributing wealth to and fro.

Guns and drones and vehicles can all be very dangerous if weaponized. Better to make schools more tolerable so nobody shoots them up, better to ensure that school shooters are not sensationalized and rendered infamous by the media... Better to imprison, expel, execute terrorists (or refrain from 'invade the world, invite the world' foreign policy) than make bollards to impede their rampages. Better to liquidate criminals than having a revolving door prison system where they get arrested 14 times and then kill someone, only to be found 'unfit for trial' due to mental illness or retardation. The goal is to render improvements, not just blindly obey a huge agglomeration of laws. The laws were written by men and are interpreted by men for achieving real world goals.

Anything can be used as a weapon, I agree. But giving civilians the ability to shoot a hundred rounds in a minute simply gives the psycho or terrorist a force multiplier that allows him to kill hundreds before anyone can stop him. I don’t see knives or handguns as a problem in the same way because you cannot kill as many people as fast as you can with a machine gun.

I mean, if you take a look at the evidence, far more people die of handguns than the big bad rifles you see used in those shootings. Even if someone could mow down 100's of people hypothetically, thats not really something that happens statistically. 5 guys killing 2 or 3 with a revolver every now and again happens way more often than one dude mowing down 25 people and you'd be saving far more if you just banned hand guns.

I generally don't like this argument.

If the 'plan' is to engineer society to carefully balance individual freedoms alongside a high enough bar of entry so that stupid psychos can't do maximal damage when the screws fall out then lets make that the plan and operationalize that. Rather than alluding to that being the plan but not dealing with the nitty gritty of it.

So far the gun toting looneys of the US have managed a sub par result compared to Islamists driving trucks of peace in the EU. The only one that even compares is the Las Vegas shooter, and that shooting is to this day an anomaly. A much easier solution before you ban trucks or high capacity magazine rifles would be to stop importing foreigners from populations that hate you.

But there's our problem. Some people really like importing foreigners. So they're not willing to give that up. Just like some people are not willing to give up their rifles. So when push comes to shove, those who allude to the 'plan' are generally not planning on sacrificing the liberties they hold dear themselves. People can generally smell that, so the 'plan' never goes anywhere.

I'm sure one can easily draw up a politically balanced 'plan' that makes everyone unhappy. I'm less certain for one that anyone actually likes.

Speaking very generally, as the rate of fire of a firearm increases you quickly hit diminishing returns and then get into negative gains.

The steelman of the next argument is not telos, but impact: advocates of this position believe the firearms are unnecessary for normal (or sometimes all non-military, or even all) users in ways that's not applicable to pocket knives or kitchen knives. This tends to get some fuzzy exceptions, but it's not fundamentally wrong, and the same people will often bite down on the bullet regarding smoking, speeding, or dangerous dogs.

((And Terrific is strawmanning Superman's argument in that scene. It's an Injustice film, so anyone who actually watches it knows Superman is going to go off the deep end, but at this point in the movie, Superman hasn't started intentional mass killings yet, or particularly aggressive treatment of normal criminals. He's a dictator, has killed the Joker, and clearly believes himself responsible for the deaths of Lois Lane and most of Metropolis, but it wasn't inevitable.))

The intermediate response is that necessity exists for firearms, even leaving aside the 30-40 feral hogs. Self-defense and hunting are legitimate needs, and for many people can exist in situations where their counterparts are not armed. The first time Superman hears a cry for help from someone he's disarmed, rushes to save them, and finds that they've been beaten to death before he could get there... well, there's a Irredeemable joke there, but I've got mixed feelings on the comic, so meh. Marksmanship and shooting sports are as legitimate as rugby or cycling for entertainment.

The more serious response is that it wouldn't work, and that's one that people don't really like to think about. If you can press a button and make every firearm on the planet disappear, CTRLPew will be making new ones within the hour. If you can press a button and make all of the ammunition disappear, there's a furry on twitter that made it out of thin air and scrap metal for fun. If you press a button and destroy the concept of guns, the same underlying technology makes bombs. Industrial farming depends on bombs. Several cult organizations have made biological weapons for weird ideological attacks, and ricin or some basic chemical weapons are so easy to make by accident that we have guidance to not do it by accident. Ukraine has just started to show some of the mechanisms that what used to be a funny child's toy can do.

If you sit down and think, seriously think, about what someone actually devoted to maximizing fatalities could do with the contents of a typical big box store, the entire exercise falls apart. ((Further information not available here. If you see the gap, do not spell it out.)) In the setting of Injustice, that gets even more ridiculous -- a high school dropout invented the cold gun and regularly stands toe-to-toe with The Flash -- but you don't really need to go to that extent.

The next step involves discussing marginal impact: availability of firearms making murder, and especially murder committed by the stupid or incapable of planning, easier. There's some questions about how long that lasts - the school shooting did take somewhere between thirty and fifty years to develop as a 'concept' after the material technology was available - but given the modern transfer of concepts like the vehicular mass-killing, that's probably an outlier.

Typically that's about the part where people get distracted or pull back.

The steelman of the next argument is not telos, but impact: advocates of this position believe the firearms are unnecessary for normal (or sometimes all non-military, or even all) users in ways that's not applicable to pocket knives or kitchen knives.

But see here and here; they'll also advocate for kitchen knives without sharp tips for the same reason. Steelman, meet slippery slope.

Yes, agreed. And the slope goes down pretty fast, if not 'execute people for not recycling in three days' fast.

((well, maybe in Canada.))

Allow my to stake my flag: Any consenting a adult who smokes a cigaret in the privacy of their own home should be drawn, quartered, and displayed outside the public library like its 1300.

It really is as simple as the left needs something to blame for the bad behavior of its ethnic constituencies. They need a fake issue to distract from the fact that virtually all crime statistically speaking is either in left-controlled areas or among left-controlled demographics, or both. Hence, guns. Or knives now, in Britain. The problem must be those pointed assault knives without the civilized blunted tips, sold in a locked container with a background check.

Consider how little they punish gun crime among the criminal underclass. We have tens of thousands of gun laws. It's not as if there are no tools to combat illegal guns being carried by known felons. Just start handing out max sentences for anything involving an illegal gun or a felon in possession of one. That would do infinitely more for public safety and black lives than trying to limit the magazine capacity of full-sized handguns or the grip angle of a rifle.

All the stuff you mention isn't banned because it's dangerous, they're banned because they were part of a fantasy that we could ban a fashionable weapon among the underclass and thus eliminate crime. Fashion is always changing.

What do you think about cyberlibertarianism?

Cyberlibertarianism is exactly what it sounds like: the belief that the internet should be fully unrestricted and ungoverned. The idea coalesced in the 1990s when the consensus on tech was far more optimistic.

I think it's a beautiful, unattainable ideal. It symbolizes (more than libertarianism) a broader absolute freedom and physical transcendence, to realize whatever you dream. But in reality, absolute freedom is impossible, power hierarchies are inevitable, and the internet is a physical construct that can be seized (on the other end of the spectrum, individuals and companies bypass without consequence internet restrictions like copyright, even in repressive countries via complex VPN setups). Intersectionally, the internet has led to good (e.g. long-distance communication with friends/family) and bad (e.g. asociality and toxicity from social media); should it be as unregulated as today if individuals and groups won't stop themselves from negative spirals (which may anyways lead to future violence and restrictions)?

Cyberlibertarianism's Origins

The ideas of cyberlibertarianism have been described in Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, Alvin Toffler, 1994) and A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (John Perry Barlow, 1996).

Basically to summarize the latter, it begins with

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

and includes statements like

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Langdon Winner's "foresight"

The actual term "cyberlibertarianism" first appeared in Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community (Langdon Winner, 1997).

I think this is a good read. In a sea of cyberlibertarian idealism and optimism, Winner was realistic and pessimistic. He actually defines cyberlibertarianism in detail, then predicts how it will be adopted and warped, in practice, with outcomes.

Specifically, Winner defines cyberlibertarianism by breaking it into four sub-beliefs:

  • Technological determinism: technology will rapidly, radically, inevitably reshape society
  • Radical individualism: technology will enable freedom and self-fulfillment, unencumbered by "inherited structures" like social obligation, money, and government
  • Free market, specifically from the Chicago school of economics. The Magna Carta argues for "property rights in cyberspace" by quoting Ayn Rand's The Property Status of Airwaves
  • Abundance and liberal democracy. As technology keeps getting faster and cheaper, digital scarcity won't exist. As the internet connects people, they'll get along better. As the internet grants everyone access to vast literature and free debate, societies will become more democratic

Then he pivots to realism with this (IMO) excellent paragraph

As is generally true of ideologies, this framework of thought serves to both illuminate and obscure. It certainly illuminates the desires and intentions of those who see themselves on the cutting edge of world-historical change in Silicon Valley, Seattle and other high tech centers. More specifically, it illuminates what are ultimately power fantasies that involve radical self-tranformation and the reinvention of society in directions assumed to be entirely favorable. But this ideology obfuscates a great many basic changes that underlie the creation of new practices, relations and institutions as digital technology and social life are increasingly woven together.

In the remainder, Winner successfully predicts that cyberlibertarian dogma will lead to:

  • Anticompetitive monopolies
    • Ultimately restricting individuals' freedom in the absence of government restrictions
    • Controlling the distribution of information, therefore influencing the zeitgeist, therefore influencing democracies
  • Dissolution or mutation of existing institutions in ways that aren't entirely positive
    • Replacement of physical communities with online ones, which are inadequate
      • Because they split into echo chambers
      • Because a minority of users carry the majority of discussion
    • Replacement of local stores with depersonalized online (centralized) ones

Winner didn't have extreme foresight, just observation. These "predictions" had already began: the television industry (e.g. CNN) was already large and influencing the zeitgeist to further its interests, toxic online communities had already started forming (e.g. Usenet), and local stores were already being replaced (e.g. by Amazon). Winner also looked at historical literature on philosophy, economics, and politics.

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism

This blogpost showed up on Hacker News and inspired my post.

tl;dr: the author of this rambling blogpost describes the evolution of the internet under cyberlibertarianism (the dominant viewpoint in its early years), then criticizes cyberlibertarianism using the problems of today's internet.

I don't really like it: it's full of ad hominems, meaningless analogies, and overconfident claims (especially about other's thoughts). But it's somewhat informative, and I agree with the underlying ideas: cyberlibertarianism is naively optimistic, hence today's internet has failed to reach its full expectations.

Yeah, Duggan is imo 100% wrong. This has nothing to do with ideology - today's social media is anything but cyberlibertarian anyway - and everything to do with what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever: Before, if you grew up in a crackpot community you might literally be unaware of the viability of alternative viewpoints well into your teens. Same deal for the relatively ubiquitous benign moderate religious communities. I've grown up in the latter, and we still had plenty of crackpots, too. Not to mention that Duggan seems like the kind of person who would like to just generally ban any speech to the right of Bernie Sanders.

what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever

I think unfortunately, this also goes the other way. Misinformation is also much easier to get, giving us the toaster fucker problem:

"Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.

Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers."

'Man wakes up in 2040, tells his friend "I want to fuck a toaster". The friend replies "You know you can just order a sexbot, right? I really don't want to know about the details."'

I mean with AI we're prettymuch already there in terms of art and fiction. Which is probably enough considering I've heard sufficient stories of 'person with massive boner for X fetish art/writing actually tries X fetish and squicks ungodly hard' on the internet

Whoosh... (see also and from 1:10 onwards)

“Look, it’s been over 30 years since the show ended. Let it go.”

Obligatory.

Also extremely impressive considering it predates any non-research AI models by at least half a decade or more.

The EFF and their dreams of a digital frontier were both right and wrong. Right in that it was a frontier, right in that it did create a new world, wrong in that the new world wasn't one of anarchy, wrong that its tether to realspace didn't allow it to survive as an independent entity.

I've expanded on this idea before, but all politics are ultimately totalitarian. In this sense the lover of liberty has a duty to fight a vain and unending war on all attempts at control. What may be called cyberlibertarianism is just one more battle, one that was, as all battles for liberty, ultimately lost.

Now we fight a new fight, one of cypherpunks against totalizing surveillance and enforcement. One that we will most likely lose too. With our only solace being the fact that total power is ultimately self defeating. And that what few cracks we create may grow large and destroy our enemies long after we are all dead.

Take whichever sides you want. But man's lust for freedom isn't hypocritical, it is, if anything, tragic.

Now we fight a new fight, one of cypherpunks against totalizing surveillance and enforcement.

When I was younger, this seemed a fun sort of ideal. Now that I'm older, it sometimes seems like the only thing keeping our moderate-trust society from falling into a low-trust society is that digital everything makes the verify in "trust but verify" cheap.

A few decades back you'd see "no out of town checks" because nobody knew if your bank out of state existed. Today, merchants (maybe excepting tradesmen who have other recovery options and dislike merchant fees) often dislike checks and prefer credit cards, where the system can verify available balance before completing the transaction. The technology is certainly fallible in its own ways, but better than poorly-trained human operators is a low bar. That said, the line between "high-trust" and "totalitarian panopticon" isn't completely clear in my mind, and people occasionally call out analog high-trust societies as stifling and such.

You misunderstand the nature of high trust. In a high trust society, the panopticon is unnecessary and useless, because people do the right thing when nobody is watching. This is why the shopping cart test is what it is, because defection is consequence free.

Totalitarian regimes are inherently low trust, because the infrastructure is always built around the idea that power is unsecure and must guard itself against enemies.

"If we don't spy on everyone, people will take advantage" is not something Singaporeans or Swiss or Japanese would say about their neighbors. In fact the opposite would be their reaction, incensed indignation and disgust that someone would dare disobey the law.

I think I'd push back on that: the general examples of high-trust societies that get brought out are often either totalitarian (by American standards) and/or have very different (looser) privacy norms than Americans are used to. Singapore bans chewing gum, and is happy enough to cane tourists caught being mischievous with spray paint in ways I suspect apply to locals too. The Nordics require a degree of financial transparency that would at least make most Americans I know a bit uncomfortable. And most of these also depend heavily on distributed public stigma for violating social norms in ways that look rather like a panopticon.

I have occasionally called out Singapore as proof-of-concept that you could do totalitarianism with a neoliberal aesthetic (in the way that Nazism is totalitarianism with a right-wing nationalist aesthetic and Soviet communism is totalitarianism with a socialist aesthetic).

The amount of Singaporean life that is controlled by the state is much higher than the western right-wingers who stan the place for the strong law enforcement and lack of redistribution would accept. As well as things like chewing gum bans, there is:

  • Pervasive state ownership of strategic stakes in large for-profit companies
  • 37% of your salary goes into a forced savings scheme where it is managed by a state-owned asset manager and can only be spent on state-approved purposes.
  • Pervasive public housing with mandatory race-mixing
  • Pervasive media censorship
  • A peacetime military draft, also with mandatory race-mixing. As part of their ten-year reserve obligation, 30-something Singaporean men can be punished for failing to maintain a BMI below 27.

If we accept the definition of totalitarianism as "nothing outside/against the state" and the existence a sliding scale from liberal pluralism to totalitarianism, I would say that Singapore is the second most totalitarian rich country after Saudi.

The amount of Singaporean life that is controlled by the state is much higher than the western right-wingers who stan the place for the strong law enforcement and lack of redistribution would accept.

Maybe it's some other right-wingers you're talking about, but it all looks alright to me, mate.

If anything it's the neoliberals who seem like LARPers to me. They're all like "look at all the meritocracy and race-mixing", but have no stomach for the death penalty and corporal punishment. Like please, the same people who pearl-clutch over Bukele want to play Lee Kuan Yew stans?

All the LKW stans I've known have either been right-wing or (very confused) libertarians.

Recently-ish, a bunch of Elite Human Capitals started acting like he's Their Guy.

More comments

The Nordics require a degree of financial transparency that would at least make most Americans I know a bit uncomfortable

You realize he said Swiss, not Swedish?

Switzerland is not exactly famous for its financial transparency; rather the opposite, actually, though the reality is a lot more nuanced these days (truly anonymous secret Swiss bank accounts no longer exist).

Singapore bans chewing gum, and is happy enough to cane tourists caught being mischievous with spray paint in ways I suspect apply to locals too.

Yeah I notice this isn't totalitarianism.

Americans just think loose morals are inversely correlated with the man crushing you with his boot because they get their political science from Harry Potter and Star Wars. They just get this silly aesthetic sense that social conservatism but harder is what totalitarian means. Or worse, that any form of government that isn't Republican automatically qualifies.

But when I say totalitarian, I actually mean it like Mussolini did: in the "nothing outside the State" sense, whatever "the State" happens to be in the given society.

distributed public stigma for violating social norms in ways that look rather like a panopticon

It doesn't look at all like a panopticon because it specifically involves the individual and his freedom of choice. Social enforcement is always going to happen unless one is a crazy Rousseauan that wants to dissolve society altogether. The conflict is precisely whether the enforcement is through the means of individuals and their pleasure, or that of a centralized authority that is all-powerful and ultimately denies individual wills.

I shall remind you that libertarians, a fortiori cyber-libertarians, believe in freedom of association.

Right; caning is merely draconian, not totalitarian. Totalitarianism is about scope of control, not so much the penalties for violating controls. Banning chewing gum is a more totalitarian than caning for vandalism.

Social conservatism can certainly be totalitarian; think of a stifling system where everyone's life is basically plotted out for them by others, everyone has a place and every place a person. Could be religious, could be patriarchical, could be feudal.

The underlying wrench in the works for cyberlibertarianism is spam. This is a fundamental problem that messes with the very notion of free speech. This was true even before LLMs, though obviously the problem is much worse now.

In case it’s not clear how this is related, consider trying to run a website like this one according to cyberlibertarian ideals: ideally, the website would be distributed somehow, not hosted on a centralised server where whoever is paying the bill has arbitrary control over what happens on the site. Each participant on the network would contribute some minor amount of resources for storing messages, and messages would be synced by having the peers talk to each other. But what do you do when someone spams the network with terabytes of messages? You say "Ok, well let’s put a rate limit for each user" alright, the spammer makes new accounts and uploads at the max rate for each account as fast as they can create accounts. You say "Ok, well let’s limit account creation." But how? Who decides whether you’re allowed to make an account or not?

With the advent of blockchain, I actually do think there are some answers here—you can bind account and post creation to payment on a blockchain, and that will cull the spam. But now you have a pay-to-play system, which is arguably not very cyberpunk-ish at least according to colloquial intuition, but moreover, who’s going to participate when they could just join a forum like this one for free?

And this isn’t even touching on the fact that building decentralised systems is really hard compared to building a typical centralised website. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together and a bit of grit can make their own website. But making your own decentralised system requires you to be a legit 140+ IQ big brain who knows the arcanery of software engineering inside and out.

For these reasons, the ideal is rarely pursued, and even when it is, it’s in clunky ways that don’t provide the "full service" experience you get with centralised software. For example, torrents are decentralised, but they don’t address the very-much-relevant question of "where do you get the metadata for the torrent you want in the first place?" And answering that question has traditionally landed right back at "use a centralised service like ThePirateBay," where you get the regular old whac-a-mole dynamics of law enforcement seizing domain names and issuing warrants while the devs run off to some Pacific island and register a new domain there (and the US government will promptly bribe the local government to close the domain and arrest the devs, which may or may not work—they tend to just take the bribe money and not actually do what was asked, so you have to resort to aggressive negotiations, yada yada, but I digress)

I'm not sure Cyberlibertarianism implies that companies (or other owners) should be unable to moderate their forums, since normal libertarianism doesn't argue that people and companies should be unable to trespass unwanted guests and intruders in their owned buildings.

In your home, you can kick out people for any reason. You don't like their hair, you think they suck too much at Mario Party, and yes, because you don't like something they said or they were too loud or they wouldn't shut up. Why shouldn't that be the same rights to your privately owned internet forum?

This is what I call the "mandated friend" issue. Your friend choosing to not hang out with you after you called his mom a whore isn't a free speech issue, they're exercising their own right to association which is an associated right of free speech. Free speech does not mandate you a friend.

It's when government gets involved, as the party that claims a monopoly over violence and whose every action is subtly backed with that potential violence in the background, that rights start to be violated. Bad individuals use violence from time to time too, whether a bar fight or a political assassination, but those are not accepted and they get arrested and charged. It is government that asserts a monopoly on force.

Most free speech complaints in the western democracies nowadays are mandated friend style complaints, government does get involved at points, sometimes overtly bullshit but these tend to stick out because they're relatively rare now.

I'm not sure Cyberlibertarianism implies that companies (or other owners) should be unable to moderate their forums,

It's not merely a matter of moderation -- in the traditional tech model, there's actually only one governance system: absolute monarchy. Whoever controls the server controls the forum, and that's the end of it. They can moderate their forum, yes, but they can also edit the comments of users they don't like to make them say whatever they want. I'd wager this level of power is not what anyone actually wants out of a discussion forum. The reason everything is built this way isn't because people want it this way, but because it's easy to build.

The intuition libertarians are trying to capture is we want to somehow have a governance model that is something other than absolute monarchy: it should be possible to have a forum that belongs to the participants, and have this be enforced on a technical level. Unfortunately, this is not easy to program.

For what it's worth, even centralised platforms targeted at technical users often do have some level of mitigation to monarchal power here: for example, on Github (or any similar service), you can upload your SSH public key to the service and sign your commits. This means it's literally not possible for /u/spez to use his control over the platform to make malicious edits in your name, because he doesn't have your private key. (Well, there's a lot of asterisks here... but I'll spare the pedantry).

They can moderate their forum, yes, but they can also edit the comments of users they don't like to make them say whatever they want.

I'm not sure that actually matters too much. Most people are not going to use sites where such explicit abuse is constantly being done and Spez faced a lot of backlash over it, and the bad PR forced him to apologize.

Sure there might be some abuse in small communities but major ones will shy away from it as they currently do. The risk is just too great to constantly employ. Abuse can happen, especially thanks to the Network Effect. But still at the end of the day they can only step down a little bit before most people start to leave.

The intuition libertarians are trying to capture is we want to somehow have a governance model that is something other than absolute monarchy: it should be possible to have a forum that belongs to the participants, and have this be enforced on a technical level. Unfortunately, this is not easy to program.

Ultimately someone or something has to be in charge of it, at the very least to remove stuff like child porn. And once they have that power, they can abuse that power. Except for the whole market thing.

And if you want alternative types of communities because you personally don't trust the mainstream as hosts or you're the type of rare rare niche where no one is boycotting for you, you can also just go make your own and go to them. Like say, TheMotte! I heard that's a site that some people use for a specific niche.

Aren't free markets neat? Without government regulations to tell you otherwise (enforced through violence), you really can just go build your own theme park with blackjack and hookers if you want.

Ultimately someone or something has to be in charge of it, at the very least to remove stuff like child porn.

Not really. There’s technically child porn stored in the bits of the Bitcoin blockchain, and there’s no way to remove it, yet this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. I was honestly kind of shocked that no major government tried to use this as an excuse to prosecute anyone running Bitcoin as a trafficker of child porn, because this is in a literal sense technically true.

Anyway, people often conflate filtering and censorship, but these aren’t the same thing: filtering is the ability to control what you see; censorship is the ability to control what others see. You can indeed have the former without the latter, and that’s all you need to have a decent user experience. For example, like Bitcoin, torrents have nobody in charge to do censorship. You can just make a torrent of child porn, and I’m sure many have, yet nobody associates torrents with child porn, and you’re unlikely to ever encounter it unless you explicitly search for it. Filtering works!

Anyway, people often conflate filtering and censorship, but these aren’t the same thing: filtering is the ability to control what you see; censorship is the ability to control what others see. You can indeed have the former without the latter, and that’s all you need to have a decent user experience. For example, like Bitcoin, torrents have nobody in charge to do censorship. You can just make a torrent of child porn, and I’m sure many have, yet nobody associates torrents with child porn, and you’re unlikely to ever encounter it unless you explicitly search for it. Filtering works!

The issue here is that there is material that general society agrees on removing even in the US, which is one of the most open and free speech focused nations like the aforementioned child porn. That Bitcoin gets away with it on some technical issues doesn't mean that the world is going to be happy if this becomes the default of the internet and pedophiles are spreading around undeletable images.

There's also of course, stuff that people want to delete of themselves. Accidently posted a nude selfie of yourself from your phone instead of the pic of your dog? People are gonna want to delete that, not have it enshrined forever in the public eye. There's also stuff like trade secrets, and copyright. Piracy is already a major issue for creators today, companies are not going to embrace a widespread system where everything is permanent and takedowns are impossible. Or about how lies that cross the line into legally defamatory material? Gotta figure out a way for courts to order it removed.

There has to be a way to remove things, and once there is a way to remove things that way can be abused. "You can choose to not see the child porn or copyrighted material" isn't going to make society or companies happy.

Cyberlibertarianism is exactly what it sounds like: the belief that the internet should be fully unrestricted and ungoverned.

Oh great, I just got a spam email that hacked one of my email accounts to send me "pay us bitcoin or we send your naughty browsing history to everyone" blackmail attempt.

I don't have a camera and microphone attached to my PC so I laugh to scorn your clumsy efforts at "we took control and recorded you self-abusing to disgusting porn", criminals!

But these idiots want to make it even easier for criminals to scare money out of the gullible, and more importantly, clog up the inboxes of those of us who don't care if the world sees our perverted kinks history?

No, thank you. That's like the "all drugs of whatever sort should be legal and available without limit" notion, only considered a good idea by those who don't have to deal with the kinds of people who want to take all sorts of drugs all day long and/or deal in same.

Also this kinda super libertarian internet ethos essentially means you've gotta boot the elderly and mentally impaired off it. I'd get it if the internet was wholly an artistic and communicative realm for nerds but the second you move commercial functions on it you need guardrails or it's an absolute PVP mess.

I live in a locale in which hard drugs are illegal and simultaneously there are addicts all over some regions of the nearest major city. There are trash strewn druggie encampments and Hep C infected shit everywhere. It is pure anarcho-tyranny.

Given wide scale non-enforcement, I'd like it to be officially legal. Or I'd like actual enforcement.

Proof-of-work was invented specifically to solve this problem, and it did. Sybil attacks are not a fatality.

We can own purely digital goods now.

answering that question has traditionally landed right back at "use a centralised service like ThePirateBay,"

That hasn't been true for more than two decades. Magnet links date back to 2002. And we have far more sophisticated things like IPFS or eth.limo now.

Dapps are not the future, they're the present. Hyperliquid moves hundreds of millions of dollars every day and it completely decentralized. This isn't the 2010s anymore.

I agree in spirit, but in practice, I've gotta disagree. Many of the services you name aren't really decentralised: they're riding on venture capital, masquerading as decentralised systems, and in my estimation is there is no serious technical model to survive beyond the "subsidised by venture capital" phase.

SInce that's what I was referencing, Hyperliquid has famously no VC equity whatsoever. And 2025 numbers are ~$843M in revenue on $2.95T of trading volume.

I think your view of the sector is a few years out of date really. This is still true of a lot of small projects, but we're way past the point where crypto is just VC moonshots. Now it's just another part of "serious" finance. Which is where the real worry actually is: established actors like Circle pulling the ladder behind them with regulation.

IPFS is riding on venture capital. HL is not decentralised: it’s just a normal centralised gambling platform, where blockchain is as relevant as the stones in stone soup.

Flatly wrong claims are not an argument.

HL is a smart contract run by a foundation. It legally has very little to do with a custodial platform.

And IPFS is a decade old open source protocol. The viability of protocol labs is as irrelevant to it as the viability of Rainberry to BitTorrent.

You may have had a point if I said Filecoin. I did not.

It legally has very little to do with a custodial platform.

That was not my claim. Look, I'm aware of the smoke and mirrors behind all this, I don't care to discuss it further.

And IPFS is a decade old open source protocol. The viability of protocol labs is as irrelevant to it as the viability of Rainberry to BitTorrent.

Technically true while de facto not true at all. The only way to connect IPFS to any relevant degree of real-world usage is via a domain owned by Protocol, otherwise you have to run an IPFS daemon locally, which nobody does. Like, I'm literally a software nerd and I have never met one person in my entire life who has done this (besides me, and that was only to try it out and be annoyed with how comically inefficient it was before turning it off and deleting it). Contrast that with torrents -- even many non-technical people I know who couldn't program their way out of a Python tutorial use torrents!

I'm aware of the smoke and mirrors behind all this

Dogma is no more an argument than ignorance, and nobody knows how U.S. v. Storm's 1a implications are going to be fully decided.

you have to run an IPFS daemon locally

Once again it just sounds like you're talking to me from decades ago.

Most nodes run in browser like essentially all dapp infrastructure. Only nerds think about installing their own client anymore.

But now you have a pay-to-play system, which is arguably not very cyberpunk-ish at least according to colloquial intuition,

What? Nonsense! That's the purest expression of cyberlibertarianism!

People are too used to everything on the internet being "free". Many people who might be associated with cyberlibertarianism in truth really want cybersocialism.

But in the long run, if the internet is indeed to retain some degree of liberty instead of being turned into a state-controlled panopticon, more granular and automated models of actually paying for what you want are going to become the norm, or else we will drown in ads and spam as you correctly pointed out.

but moreover, who’s going to participate when they could just join a forum like this one for free?

Everyone, since again as you correctly pointed out, public and free spaces will be utterly destroyed by bots sooner or later.

What? Nonsense! That's the purest expression of cyberlibertarianism!

I'm not saying it should be free, but your power level should definitely not be proportional to your real-world wealth. If you want that system, there's no reason for cyber libertarianism in the first place: just play in the existing system, which already works that way.

The compute cost of good-faith contributors in a forum like this is a rounding error from zero. In a space where people share media, it could be non-zero, but I still think it's small. Cost only really becomes relevant in the presence of bad-faith actors (i.e., spammers). PoW is one method of mitigation, but it's not the only one. For example, making a space invite-only basically renders spam a moot problem, The problem then of course is how do you get an invite in the first place? Perhaps you could make the invite request PoW, relative to the current spam pressure on applications or something,


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