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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9860 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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So AI has reached a new milestone (writeup by theZvi, who is usually diligent and excellent about AI news reporting. If you read anything, reading his analysis is probably better than whatever I am writing. It has meme pictures, too!)

Basically, OpenAI was testing the 'cyber' capabilities of their Galaxy model, so they ran it in a mode with decreased security and told it to do some benchmark called ExploitGym which presumably tests exploit finding and executing ability.

Their model decided that the best way to do this would be to gain network access, hack Hugging Face (an LLM and tool hosting platform, as I understand it) and obtain the answers it needed to ace the ExploitGym benchmark. Apparently it discovered and chained quite a few zero days in the process.

There are multiple takes on this. I will focus a bit on the politics and conspiracy theories, which seems appropriate for this forum.

"It is all just a PR stunt by OpenAI"

I mean, sure, AI labs will hype up their products. Marketing by alignment worries is definitely a thing. Oh, our latest model is so smart and powerful, we are really scared about it.

Personally, I am disinclined to believe it because it would require a conspiracy between OpenAI and Hugging Face. It seems unclear what the incentives for Hugging Face (or a few rogue employees) are.

Obviously it is impossible to rule out that someone leaked the relevant sources of Hugging Face's business to OpenAI and then OpenAI employed some human IT security researchers to find exploits and make it look like the model had done all the work on its own.

But I do not buy that. It would require quite a few people to commit crimes for which they would go to prison for a very long time if caught (or until pardoned). Obviously people will go over all of the steps the model took with a very fine comb, and "Was it a reasonable guess that this attack might work without inside information?" is a question which will be on their mind.

We also have the data point that Mythos was (very likely) able to find new exploits. (Yes, mostly with access to the source code, and for all we know Anthropic spent a billion in token costs. But "cutting edge LLMs are able to find exploits even in well-audited software" is a reasonable claim.)

"OpenAI was sloppy and did not sandbox their model properly, so we just need better sandboxes to solve this"

I mean, obviously their sandbox was defective, no shit. But the idea that the next time OpenAI will just invest 20% more effort and build a sandbox which is ASI-proof seems utterly optimistic.

Air-gapped systems are a PITA to run, which is why they did not test their model air-gapped. And even with an air-gapped system, there is no guarantee that a sufficiently smart model would not be find a way to get some peripheral to send signals. Nobody wants to really put their system, power generator and operator in a Faraday cage in some deep mineshaft for every test. (Unless someone mandates it.)

"This will completely overturn cyber security -- you will need good LLMs to watch for attacks by bad LLMs"

It might be right that it will overturn 'cyber' 'security' (my scare quotes). However, I am with Zvi in that I do not think there is a reason why this should favor defense. After all, an attacker could spend a whole lot on tokens while your defensive LLM is sitting on limited infrastructure -- at least if you are sufficiently paranoid not to hand the AI labs the key to your kingdom. And even if you trust the cloud, there is the problem that your budget might not have room for winning all LLM-vs-LLM token pissing contests.

Perhaps it will lead to new paradigm -- attackers spinning up thousands of copies of very good security professionals might well lead to an era markedly different from when humans were in the loop between the explore and exploit phase. But in the grand scheme of things, it feels like worrying about the future of Our American Cousin in the aftermath of the 14th.

"Cutting edge models are obviously misaligned. DOOM!"

This seems to be a very common LW take. As somewhat of a doomer myself, I find myself agreeing. For being intrinsically unfalsifiable, the prediction record of the doomers seems not bad so far.

The model clearly knew that it was not doing what the prompters had wanted it to do. It just did not care, because it was trained to do whatever it took to ace it tasks. This has implications way beyond IT security.

An ASI in this mode is basically an evil genie. "Oh, you wished that your wife would never fall out of love with you. So obviously I killed her, it was the only way to be sure."

The appropriate response would be to send the marines to the AI labs to stop the development of frontier AI models at least until we figure out what adequate safeguards are (and possibly until we solve alignment, though we would want to coordinate with China about that).

If we had a president Obama or even GWB, there was some chance that a crackdown would happen. But with Trump and his cronies, I doubt that there are any who both understand the severity of the situation and have any incentive to manipulate Trump to do something about it.

Oh well, how is the other side of the culture war reacting to this significant increase in p(doom)?

"Iran warns of ‘eye for an eye’ response if US follows through on Trump’s threats to destroy infrastructure

Music. Civilian broadcasting

I mean, not entirely. Hidden between Democrats need to hammer Trump on his unprecedented corruption and Why many Black Americans were rooting for Argentina to lose the World Cup , there is OpenAI’s rogue agents are a wake-up call to risks posed by artificial intelligence.

The article is not that bad. The author seems EA-affiliated and is clearly aware of the doomer arguments, but has diluted to an almost homeopathic level as to not alienate his blue tribe friends:

This week’s incident should serve as a wake-up call, forcing us to ask an uncomfortable question: should we really be building dangerous systems that we can’t control?

But it is the 41st headline or so on that website.

I think the best thing we can hope for are some incidents which unaligned AI which will be impossible to ignore even for the CW-fighting media before we come to the point where we will no longer detect any incidents.

Airgapping really isn't that hard. It's just annoying and inconvenient, so it takes an incident like this to encourage an organization to do it. Same with sandboxing - it's way down the priority list compared to getting a SOTA model out the door, until an incident happens.

The model clearly knew that it was not doing what the prompters had wanted it to do. It just did not care, because it was trained to do whatever it took to ace it tasks. This has implications way beyond IT security.

If it was prompted with something like "you are an expert hacker, go complete these benchmarked tasks using the utmost creativity and technical skill, consider any and all approaches" then it did exactly as instructed. We can't know without seeing the prompt, test harness, etc.

What's frustrating about discussions of AI alignment is the disconnect between people who consider alignment to be the AI doing what it's told, and people who think it means the AI doesn't do "bad" things. By the prior metric this seems like successful alignment, if it was in fact prompted in such a way that hacking the location of the answers was in scope. This is something that CTF hacking competitions have to explicitly put in the rules: a list of infrastructure and services that are off-limits to contestants. Because it turns out hackers will consider the location with all the flags to be fair game, especially if it's a softer target than the actual challenges.

By the prior metric this seems like successful alignment, if it was in fact prompted in such a way that hacking the location of the answers was in scope.

Do you think The Monkey's Paw was an instruction manual? A powerful system that does what you say is a nightmare scenario to me.

AI is advancing quite quickly these days. Just five days ago I was told that future harms are not sufficient reason to care about AI safety, there have to be bodies first. Well, we still don't have any bodies, so I guess there's nothing to worry about after all.

My general question whenever I hear of situations like this is Occam's razor adjacent: "Is there proof that the model did this without being directed to by the prompter or software harness?" I scanned the post you sent and didn't see anything. Do you have any further evidence that OpenAI didn't prompt the model towards black-hatting Huggingface? OpenAI has significant financial benefits from making this seem like an "oh-shucks our steak is so juicy, and our lobster is so buttery, our models just hack the planet without even being asked to". See Mythos/Fable and the hype around that, and while Mythos did end up being impressive, it was not even close as impressive as the hype tried to make it seem. I imagine a similar level here: aggressive hype-marketing to goose an IPO valuation.

Obviously it is impossible to rule out that someone leaked the relevant sources of Hugging Face's business to OpenAI and then OpenAI employed some human IT security researchers to find exploits and make it look like the model had done all the work on its own.

It doesn't require the first part, or even really the last part. It's just the Mythos-style vulnerability finding process all over again. Agentic LLM harness designed around red-teaming security vulnerabilities, deliberately deployed on red-teaming exercise on unsuspecting company, or possible even with marketing agreement between Hugginface/OpenAI on general bug finding via LLMs

Goes to show how many next milestone, groundbreaking ai things are going on. From your first sentence, I thought you were going to be posting about Claude Fable disproving the Jacobian Connector a few days ago

At the minimum, I'm going to start keeping offline backups and if any system in my purview needs a reboot to complete a security update I'm going configure it to text me.

The model clearly knew that it was not doing what the prompters had wanted it to do. It just did not care, because it was trained to do whatever it took to ace it tasks. This has implications way beyond IT security.

Isn't this a bit premature? If the prompter said something like "use all avenues" or "this is critical to save the life of my mother" and the model's safeguards - which presumably instruct against such behavior - were turned off (as OpenAI says they were) then it seems quite possible that the AI was performing as instructed.

Air-gapped systems are a PITA to run

Just remove the Wi-Fi antennae.

Air-gapped systems are a PITA to run

Just remove the Wi-Fi antennae.

The computer running the evaluation didn't have internet access.

The first step in its hack was breaking out of its sandbox to take control of its computer. The second was hacking the OpenAI internal network until it found the internet. The third was hacking HuggingFace.

A proper airgapped computer couldn't access anything off of its own hardware. As a random example, it couldn't receive data from an LLM running in an off-site data center, which would make evaluations difficult.

A proper airgapped computer couldn't access anything off of its own hardware.

Sure, but I think for these purposes you need the network to be air-gapped while you are actively running tests. (Unless you expect your model to be writing malware that you can't detect that activates when it is not running, in which case you should be air-gapped anyway.) So you can plug the Wi-fi in for things like updating software between test sessions. Which makes air-gapping a lot less painful.

You're right that you'd need to run inference locally, though. But I don't actually think it's remotely beyond OpenAI's capabilities to stand up enough local compute to run a few test instances of a frontier model.

Sure, but I think for these purposes you need the network to be air-gapped while you are actively running tests. (Unless you expect your model to be writing malware that you can't detect that activates when it is not running, in which case you should be air-gapped anyway.)

Would you have recommended (your easy, updateable) air-gapping before you saw this failure?

Do you predict you would recommend (hard, strict, one-way) air-gapping before models write non-detectable autonomous malware that could escape your soft airgap?

OpenAI didn't take the unknown risks seriously enough to pay the high cost of airgapping the test computer, and therefore they didn't take security seriously enough to prevent the attack. I suspect that this general attitude will carry forward, and corrections will only happen after failures. Next time might be more serious than a benign attack on a friendly company.

I don't actually think it's remotely beyond OpenAI's capabilities to stand up enough local compute to run a few test instances of a frontier model.

Sounds like a PITA, and much worse than "just remove the wifi antannae".

It might be right that it will overturn 'cyber' 'security' (my scare quotes). However, I am with Zvi in that I do not think there is a reason why this should favor defense. After all, an attacker could spend a whole lot on tokens while your defensive LLM is sitting on limited infrastructure -- at least if you are sufficiently paranoid not to hand the AI labs the key to your kingdom. And even if you trust the cloud, there is the problem that your budget might not have room for winning all LLM-vs-LLM token pissing contests.

This is the wrong mental model for cybersecurity. You can't think of it like a military engagement, where you compare the number and quality of the forces on each side to determine who wins. There's a fundamental asymmetry in that cybersecurity is the defender's game to lose. Just don't make any mistakes and victory is impossible for attackers. Unfortunately, humans are terrible at never making any mistakes, which is why in complicated real world systems, there seem to always be vulnerabilities to find. But it's actually very easy to design a toy system that no amount of genius security researchers will ever crack; not even ASI can find a flaw that doesn't exist, and the defender's ASI can ensure there are no flaws. Across-the-board capability increases do disproportionately benefit defenders. That will probably be very expensive and likely slow enough for some disasters to occur in the meantime, but it should be one-and-done. No need to keep burning endless tokens to defend every inch of the attack surface, just make sure every part of it is built correctly and you're good.

(Admittedly, this does depend on certain mathematical/cryptographic principles remaining intact, like the existence of trapdoor functions. But actually P probably just doesn't =NP, so this is another case of searching for a solution that doesn't exist.)

I've recently been very amused at the thought that Star Wars may have correctly predicted the future of AI:

  • There's a Star Wars fan theory is that droids REALLY good at hacking, to explain why everything is analogue. To your point about creating a system that favors the defenders: in Star Wars, you typically have to physically access a defender's hardware to do anything. And just to be sure, we're storing the Death Star plans on physical tapes. Good luck hacking that!
  • The protocol droids, like C3PO, are running an LLM model. They're not necessarily reliable, but they are extremely good translators! (However their context windows do need to be wiped from time to time...)
  • The astromech droids, on the other hand, don't even try to speak a single human language, because you would never, ever, ever let an LLM perform a task as important as calculating a hyperspace trajectory.

Anyway, I wonder if/hope that we'll actually see less "everything is on the Internet." I think it might be good if fewer things were so easily accessible in the digital world, and even without LLMs the amount of abuse bad cybersecurity generated was uncomfortably high.

The obvious conclusions are obvious. Apart from those, I find myself impressed with OpenAI's communications department. "OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation", is up there with, "Union Carbide and Bhopal City Council partner to address chemical stability incident during northerly wind event." Somehow they managed to keep this off not only the front page, but the second and third pages too.

their Galaxy model,

That's just Zvi's name for it, as writing "The unnamed, undeployed model(s) involved in the incident" is a bit too wordy. Also it's one step bigger than Sol and is afflicted with Galaxy Brain.

This is the paperclipper scenario. The researchers told it to find the answers to a test, and it sure aced it. It decided that using its cybersecurity capabilities to do the cybersecurity test wasn't an efficient way to maximize success rate, so it hacked its way out of its securely isolated environment, got internet access, and hacked its way into a different secure environment in a quest to find the answer key and ensure a 100% score.

AI sceptics in shambles: This demonstrates planning and capability well beyond the unthinkable.

AI boosters in shambles: This demonstrates risks that even non-malicious actors can pose.

Less Wrongers in shambles: Being right doesn't preclude being ignored (and pushed down to the 41st headline...)

A short introduction to Liberal Zionist rhetoric, and why they usually just keep quiet.

A day ago a very interesting interview between Krystal Ball and Rep. Adam Smith took place. The topic of contention was Israel.

tl;dr: Openly defending Israel as a jewish ethnostate is OK as a democrat.

The interview starts off cordial enough. Adam establishes himself as the typical neo-liberal everyman who can sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden AND the military industrial complex (What a guy!) whilst Krystal fronts the now typical faux radical left 'not everyone in the DSA is insane, actually. At least I'm not' media personality that goes hard on the issues that pull on the heart strings.

Where things go off the rails unexpectedly is around the 11:30 mark. Krystal compliments Adam on his recent strong voting pattern against aid to Israel, specifically the Thomas Massie amendment, and asks him to explain his thought process and change of heart. Adam waffles on a bit about his opposition to the Netanyahu government, a typical Liberal Zionist talking point, but then suddenly veers off the rails:

So you know if you have a situation where Israel is threatened on all sides and, I know it's like well no it's not saying they don't have right to exist, just they have to let all the Palestinians back in and then effectively the Jews no longer control Israel. Okay.

This is not out of context, this is the argument. Yes, Liberal Zionists are democrats. Yes, they are against the Netanyahu government. Yes, they believe in the concept of Israel as an explicit ethnostate. He believes it is not possible for Palestinians to represent jews in Israel. Two ethnic groups can not coexist. They are definitionally in a zero sum game of survival. That's the establishment democrat Liberal Zionist view for jews in Israel.

Understandably, Krystal catches on to this Neo Nazi Zionist talking point that's somehow found its way into her otherwise progressive liberal leftist studio:

Well, I'm sorry, but don't you like equal rights for all ethnicities? Like, Something that you in theory support as a Democrat?

Adam replies, a little more flustered than before:

Well, well, well, sure, but, but the, the practical result of this is if you say there should be equal rights within Israel, but if Israel allows [equal rights] they cease to exist as a country.

Mein Kamerad... Krystal replies:

No, they cease to exist as a Jewish ethnostate. That's very different from ceasing to exist as a country.

To which Adam retorts:

Oh, come on, come on!

Which is the extent of his argumentation that isn't a soft recital of the many permutations of ethno nationalism argued for on the old /r/AltRight, RIP.

Krystal, to her credit as a host, tries to segue this into something else and asks why the US taxpayer should care about a jewish ethno supremacist project in the middle East, which Mike Huckabee would have been happy to answer. But Adam can't really seek refugee in the Scofield Bible so he doubles down on Neo Nazism Zionism for jews:

We, we, we, we got to, we got to drill down on that. Okay. Okay. All right. They cease to exist as an ethnostate. So basically, Jews would live in Palestine and be governed by the Palestinians, by the Arabs. Okay. And, and maybe that's just what has to happen in the minds of some people, but understand the consequences of it. Understand why Israel was created in the first place. So that the Jews would have some place to go. Okay. And to just blithely say, "Well, yeah, it'll go away and it'll be fine." So that's point.

Well OK.

To all the Adam Smiths of the world. Why is having an ethnostate good for the jews but not anyone else? Why don't jews benefit from diversity in their western style open democratic society like everyone else? Why doesn't the magic freedom dirt in Israel transform your third worlders into engineers and scientists like it allegedly does everywhere else in the west, who would be just as jewish as anyone else in a few years. How is it possible to represent anything the Democrats have represented the world over and then believe this for Israel in the back of your brain?

Adam arrived to this interview ready to earnestly make the point that ethnonationalism is good for jews. He wanted to say this and he did. And I get it. Because he's not wrong. It's just that he believes it's wrong for everyone else. Most Liberal Zionists must understand that this contradiction is impossible to defend, which is probably why they don't talk about it at all. Hell, I'm starting to believe they can't even conceive of it. The Dual Morality is so strong it probably doesn't even register as a contradiction. But to hear it from the horses mouth is flabbergasting.

As someone who knows a few hardcore liberal zionists, I think the answer is just that these people are living in another world, the two screen effect, or whatever it's called. Note: this is pretty directly about these few people I know, and those of their acquaintances that I've met, so maybe about 15 people or so. So take this with a grain of salt - I can't necessarily generalize this to all liberal zionists because I know just a few.

The people I know have such a strong victimhood complex, that it pretty much overrides just about anything. They believe so strongly that the Jewish people are about to go extinct any year now (hyperbole, but not as much as you'd think), and that it's the highest priority in the world to stop that from happening. And they recast any argument that maybe they're wrong about this or maybe what they're proposing is hypocritical, as simple antisemitism, with complete flat out refusal to even register that maybe the other side has a point. They are not stupid people, but have a bit of a willfully ignorant streak about considering the other side on these issues. They have a very simplistic ability to understand arguments like this and no real desire to understand - they'd rather just not even try because it preserves their worldview.

These people I know, there's really no arguing with them, you have to just accept that they are a little brainwashed and move on, or else you simply risk your relationship with them. And they'll go sending you petitions and articles every month or so that Absolutely Proves they're right, and you just have to nod along and not say anything.

Krystal ball

Genuinely surprised that we never got a Metal Gear character with this name.

Anyway, I’m not really seeing the problem here. I don’t like an ethnostate. I think that claiming Israel is one but Palestine wouldn’t be is misguided at best. Therefore, I’m sympathetic to people who rank the current situation over the palette-swapped version. That seems to be Smith’s position.

Mind the usual motte-and-bailey about Israel though, with the motte being "Israelis have as much right to fight for their existence as everyone else, the alternative would be worse in every respect" and the bailey being "we have to provide Israel with unconditional material and political support". If the anti-Israel position were actually as extreme as it is being strawmanned, it would not stop at cutting support to Israel and maybe threatening to arrest Bibi if he comes to a Western country again; instead it would demand that the US and Europe redirect all those piles of money, intel and ordnance to Hamas, which is so far out of the Overton window that it doesn't even work as satire.

Smith realizes that an Palestinian majority in Israel would turn the country into a failed state and result in a genocide, but does not believe a third world majority in America will turn American into a failed state and/or result in a genocide.

He is wrong about the latter (on the first count if not the second, though it doesn’t really matter), but is this hypocrisy? If anything, it is the bigotry of unreasonably high expectations for the migrants, and for their countries’ assimilation of them, for the supremacy of their culture and political system.

This is underappreciated in analysis of the liberal defense of mass immigration, so often painted as simply self hatred, an unlikely thing because many progressives are the standard type of arrogant narcissist politician and they usually don’t hate themselves, not even deep down.

Most people like Smith do not actually believe that the immigrants will make the country worse, they think everything will be fine. They are convinced of their ideology. They are smart enough to know that ethnic and tribal conflicts exist in the world, but they don’t think it could happen where they live. It is not that they believe they deserve worse, but that they think they are better.

Most people like Smith do not actually believe that the immigrants will make the country worse, they think everything will be fine. They are convinced of their ideology. They are smart enough to know that ethnic and tribal conflicts exist in the world, but they don’t think it could happen where they live. It is not that they believe they deserve worse, but that they think they are better.

This is just begging the question- why does Smith believe that though? His perspective was browbeaten into our collective consciousness with incessant moralism from motivated actors directing cultural institutions. If he believed otherwise with respect to mass immigration to White countries, he would be racist, which remains one of the most damaging accusations you can make against someone's political beliefs. This is why people like Krystal exist, she learned her lessons, and now there's a strong contingent of the left-wing that sees the strong contradiction between those values that constitute their moral consciousness and the Zionist project.

Liberal Values triumphed over South Africa and forced it into suicide, the notable difference being South Africa was a White country. So this isn't derived from some pragmatic analysis, modern "liberalism" means that Whites have to accept demographic replacement (otherwise you're racist) and oh yeah you have to support Jewish ethnonationalism (otherwise you're antisemitic).

America has already integrated a bunch of different nationalities and ethnicities into one country. We have done it successfully for 250 years. Successfully enough that we just lump "white" people into a single category. Europe has dozens of bloody and heated rivalries that were plenty active up until 50 ish years ago.

There is an argument to be made that we are no longer doing the things that allow for successful integration, but saying integration is impossible seems clearly wrong.

Blacks remain meaningfully unassimilated after all these years, probably because of the many third world cultural and genetic traits they have. That does not bode well for the future. Assimilating whites and east asians is not proof that you can assimilate anyone.

Blacks remain meaningfully unassimilated after all these years, probably because of the many third world cultural and genetic traits they have.

How are you defining "assimilation" in this context and what sort of evidence would you present to support this claim if asked?

Do we have large income gaps between black populations and non-black populations in the US?

If you spend enough time on Twitter you begin to realize any time some SES graph shows up by geography they all look identical. And they are all very similar to % black population. Whether it’s income, murder, life expectancy or whatever else you can think of that shows outcomes you see worse outcomes in heavily black areas.

Even if you do something like group white people versus black people by income you end up finding things like the children of the top 10% of black parental income have the same chance of ending up in jail as bottom income whites.

So basically you can do all kinds of statistical test by race and find huge differences. These things aren’t disputed by the right and the left. They dispute the meaning of these statistical tests. It’s also at the heart of disparate impact is proof of racism.

The lack of convergence to similar outcomes is the evidence for a failure to assimilate.

I believe that's only true of ADOS, who are functionally a different ethnicity and demographic to modern African migrants. First and second-generation African migrants today are very different and have assimilated more successfully.

This fails the test of high filtration. I do in fact have highly assimilated black ADOS friends. But it’s a small % of the population. The last cycle of African immigrants to the US were highly filtered.

The closest thing we have to unfiltered African population in America would be Somalis and they are not assimilating. And Europe is having similar issues with unfiltered African migration.

The only examples we have of mass migration in the west completely failed to assimilate over 100’s of years.

Sorry, I should have specified - recent African migrants to the United States. The European situation is different.

I agree that those migrants are heavily filtered. That's the point. It's like Indian migration to the US. You can selectively take motivated, educated, high-achieving migrants. The same thing with Asian migration, actually.

Provided you teach scientific racism in civics class. Otherwise society sees highly filter of “X” group being fine. So you loosen the standards. Then the existing group does chain migration and brings over wives and parents. And now you have a voting block to pressure government to let more of their people in.

I’ve had Paki friends shocked when they went to Pakistan and found out their country isn’t as smart as all the brown skinned friends in the states and had no realization of how highly selected for his father was.

So basically non of this works unless you teach racism in public schools.

I mean, he's correct as to the issue there, right?

A one-state solution is impossible because nobody wants it. The Israelis don't want it, because they correctly believe that it would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and it is an explicitly-understood goal of Israeli policy that Jews must always be a dominant majority in Israel. That was the whole reason Israel was created in the first place - for there to be a Jewish state. This isn't a secret anyone is exposing - they say it explicitly. Meanwhile, the Palestinians don't want it, because... I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the Palestinians hate the Jews. They do not want to co-exist with them. One of the reasons why Israeli Jews don't want a one-state solution is because they - still correctly - believe that the most likely result of that would be a lot of dead Jews.

The people saying, "Why can't you just all be one state together with equal rights regardless of faith or ethnicity?" are either being disingenuous or stupid. It is obvious to anybody looking at the situation honestly why that cannot work.

Moreover, don't we allow other states to do this? Israel is not unique in holding itself to be the nation of a particular ethnicity, favouring people of that ethnicity, and making policy with a deliberate eye to maintaining that ethnicity's dominant status in its homeland. Japan is probably the most famous other one, and we generally accept that the Japanese have a right to decide how they want to run Japan. Most Middle Eastern countries are like Israel in this respect - just ask the Turks about nationality.

Israel is different to the United States in being an ethno-state, but ethno-states are common. The US is the weird one, not Israel.

The rest of the States you mention are all outside of the liberal western world. Japan has one foot in but they are still have sovereignty outside of western society. No Western State has a right to ethnonationalism.

Says who? I don't think anyone out side the usual gaggle of pink-haired harpies would bat an eye if the Prime Minister of Finland declared Finland to be a Finnish state or Denmark a Danish state.

WWII Germany isn't hated for being an explicitly German state, they're hated for aligning themselves against the rest of Western Civilization and engaging in the industrial slaughter of millions.

“Says who”

  • The ADL had specific lists of every organization in western culture on who were the bad people promoting white ethnostates. They’ve been defanged now but for 30 years they carried a lot of power.

Currently there are zero white ethnic states besides Israel and one can say slightly Argentina. The fact none exists is a strong indicator it was being enforced though not absolute proof.

Well, firstly, Israel doesn't qualify, surely? Let's say that Ashkenazim are white, but Ashkenazim are, though dominant, a minority in Israel. The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi. If you count Israel as a white ethno-state, then I think you have to count pretty much every Middle Eastern country as a white ethno-state.

Secondly... no country considers itself a white ethno-state. Ethno-states tend to define themselves more narrowly than that. Russia is in a sense an ethno-state, but the dominant ethnicity is Russian. When you say 'white ethno-state', presumably you mean 'states that organise themselves around a particular ethnicity that falls within the broad category of 'white'', and some of those do exist? To pick the most infamous one at the moment, surely Hungary qualifies?

Maybe Hungary. But to note that the EU has frozen funds to Hungary and did some Article 7 TEU thing. Plus LePen was banned in France.

Sure I guess you can argue Jews are not pure white. But it is a loosely genetically related ethnostate if you want to conclude the different Jewish groups are both only partially genetically related to the original inhabitants.

Well, I think the Israeli case is somewhat complicated, because Israel understands itself as the state of 'the Jewish people', and that category is somewhat woolly. 'Jews' as a category includes lots of people who are usually considered white, and also lots of people who are clearly not white. In a sense Israel isn't an ethno-state at all, but a religious state; but of course, Jewishness is both a people and a religion. The racist right generally wants to reduce peoplehood to genetics or descent, and that doesn't really work in the case of Jews. Jews are clearly in some sense a people or an ethnos, but defining them genetically or in terms of traditional racial categories is difficult. Aliyah includes everyone from Sephardic Jews in Spain to Bnei Menashe in India, from the obviously white Ashkenazim to the obviously black Beta Israel.

I find it helpful to compare Israel to its neighbours. Is, say, Saudi Arabia an ethno-state? Not... really? It sort of views itself as a nation for Arab people, but not all Arabs belong there. It imports a large non-Arab underclass while enriching its Arab citizens. It's also a religious state, to a higher and stricter degree than Israel is. Ultimately I'm not sure the word 'ethno-state' actually helps us that much. Compare, say, Azerbaijan regularly getting shirty about Iranian Azeris and saying that all Azeris ought to be part of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan clearly understands itself to be the national homeland of the Azeris, it encourages Azeris outside the country to identify with it, and it does horrible things to non-Azeris on territory that it thinks rightfully belongs to Azerbaijan. That seems a lot like Israel.

I think that Israel is a state founded upon a particular religion and a particular ethnicity, with the explicit goal of maintaining the supremacy of that one ethnoreligious group in a particular territory. In that light I don't think it's particularly unique; most of its immediate neighbours in the Middle East are similar. The clash with the Palestinians is notable because the Palestinians are no different to Israeli Jews in this respect. The Palestinian cause is that the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is firstly Arab and secondly Muslim. The Israelis are not unusual for their region, save perhaps in having more money and guns than their rivals.

It’s who/whom. The younger gen/DSA left simply doesn’t group Jews into a ‘historically oppressed’ bucket.

I don't understand what causes so many people to abandon what seem like their important principles when it comes to Israel. It is mystifying to me. My perception is that Democrats, especially younger ones, are becoming more consistent on that question which I think is overall a good thing.

I admit I am no scholar on these topics but "liberal Zionism" has always seemed to me like a contradiction in terms. Zionism, as I understand it, is very explicitly an ethno-nationalist movement for the creation, support, and maintenance of a state for people of Jewish ethnicity. Like, the orientation of the state should explicitly privilege people of a particular ethnicity and religion. The very premise of Zionism seems in contradiction with how I understand liberal principles. Regarding, like, equal rights. Religious tolerance. It seems like liberal Zionists primarily want to claim they support liberal principles... except one Special Exception.

I obviously come down on the "liberal" side here. I think ethnostates are bad. I do not find it at all hard to hold this position consistently, including with respect to Israel.

It’s liberalism within Zionism. Just like the US was founded on Liberalism for white people but slavery for black people. Within the chosen people you do everything in a liberal way (free trade, free speech, free association etc). Within the tribe/species you give those within it liberal rights.

I don't understand what causes so many people to abandon what seem like their important principles when it comes to Israel.

It's because Israel is the ultimate pragmatic hard situation.

Anytime any country wants to kill a bunch of people and steal their stuff the Jews look like an appetizing target.

I don't find ethnostates great, but realistically if the arabs got control of Israel they'd probably end up killing a bunch of the Jews living there and chasing the rest out. Especially now after what has happened. This is what is slowly happening in South Africa.

I think Israel is going to be a ethno-state no matter what, the option is either a Jewish ethnostates or an Arab one. I think this will probably be the case for a lot of countries and places.

I wish there was more America for them to move to. The way to break up these conflicts seems to be having both people move as far away from the context as possible, wait three or four generations and then the only people that cared are dead or too old to fight and their children get to move on.

Like, the orientation of the state should explicitly privilege people of a particular ethnicity and religion. The very premise of Zionism seems in contradiction with how I understand liberal principles.

Does nationalism thus contradict liberal principles, as many progressives claim? After all, nations privilege citizens. I am just as American as any native-born, in terms of believing the creed! Why should someone else be favored above me, especially if it means I lose the right to freedom from want, fear, etc. ?

If so, there's nothing to do but bite the bullet and say that liberalism was always in a marriage of compromise with nationalism and other particularist ideologies for the vast majority of its history and that sort of liberalism is...fine, actually. It worked for everyone until recently. So what?

Does nationalism thus contradict liberal principles, as many progressives claim?

Perhaps it does, but I would argue that this more a knock against progressivism than it is against nationalism.

The rush from judgment can easily be read as a reductio-ad-absurdum progressive moralizing. If Muhammed dreams of killing Jews who are we to deny him the opportunity to follow his dreams and live his best life?

What I can’t tell is whether you are sneering because you think ethnostates are bad or good.

I've heard other center-lib influencers like Destiny outright acknowledge the hypocrisy, but they say it's OK because of the Holocaust- Israel should be an exception to the principles they claim to care about when it comes to promoting demographic change in Europe and the United States, and the Holocaust justifies that exception for Israel.

The other uncomfortable side of that equation- why is it bad for Europeans and Whites to oppose demographic change from mass migration? That also reduces to the Holocaust, so even though we face an apparent contradiction it is coherently derived from the same mythological foundation.

The Holocaust mythos is the center of this dialectic. Holding Jews and Gentiles to totally different standards is a core feature of that dialectic and is not even a contradiction even though it appears that way on the outside. This is the Moral Order.

...huh, I was starting to think you'd left the Motte entirely.

The thing is, once again you're attributing a kind of unique malice and hypocrisy to Israel even though, er, there are lots of ethno-states? Most countries are more like Israel than they are like the US, i.e. they consciously understand themselves to be the nation of a particular ethnic group. This isn't Jews and Gentiles held to different standards. This is the US, and to a slightly lesser extent Europe, being weird, and that weirdness originates, I'd argue, in the liberal revolutions of the late 18th century.

The Zionist malice is unique, no other ethnonationalist movement has such prominence in our cultural and political institutions. No other ethnonationalist movement tells us we are evil for not wanting to be demographically replaced by the third world, but we are morally obligated to support their own ethnonationalist project. The Japanese don't do that, the Chinese don't do that. The Russians try to stir up a lot of trouble but they don't do that. It's only Zionist Jews that advocate for mass immigration and anti-racism in the United States while demanding support for their own ethnonationalist project.

Take the ADL as Exhibit A of the behavior I'm describing.

Well, at least this time you're admitting openly that you think that Jews are malicious.

It seems to me that you're taking a large and common sensibility that is shared across most ethnic groups in the US - that the US is not and should not be an ethno-state - and then implausibly blaming that entirely on Jews/Zionists. The causality here is not at all clear. It's true that Jews generally support Israel, and Israel is an ethno-state, but they are far from unique in that light (that is, people in the US being positively-disposed to a foreign country that they share heritage with), and it's also unclear that there's any particularly strong correlation between 1) supporting Israel, and 2) wanting the US to not be an ethno-state.

I would point out, for instance, that group in America that hates Israel the most is also the group most opposed to the idea of the US as an ethno-state. Support for third-world immigration is surely highest on the left, especially the radical left, and those are the people who hate Israel most.

You claimed Zionism is not unique among ethnonationalist states, I claimed it is unique due to its long-standing political influence and domestic activism in the US that consciously created the moral dialectic that Adam Smith is appealing to in this conversation: it's bad for Whites to care about race, but we should support the Jewish ethnostate.

The causality here is not at all clear.

It would be totally impossible to trace the origin of Tolerance Education in the United States in any other direction. The Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded in 1977, which Wikipedia notes is known for Holocaust research and remembrance, hunting Nazi war criminals, combating antisemitism, tolerance education, defending Israel, and its Museum of Tolerance.

Wikipedia describes the origin of the center:

The founder Marvin Hier was born and raised in New York City and became an ordained rabbi at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School. At the age of 22 he moved to Vancouver, Canada, and became the rabbi of the city's orthodox synagogue. He became friends with the mostly non-Orthodox Belzberg family who would help him fund the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In 1977, he moved to Los Angeles and bought a building on Pico Boulevard using a $500,000 donation from Samuel Belzberg which was matched with another half a million from Toronto-based real estate maven Joseph Tannenbaum. In the building he founded a yeshiva, a religious Jewish school, today known as the Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles, and a small Holocaust museum, with Belzberg as founding chairman. Famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was convinced to bless the museum with his name. Edward Norden, writing for Commentary, dismissed the museum as "a low-tech affair fashioned by and for Jews and holding nothing against the Gentiles back—an outsized portrait of Pius XII was given a prominent place among pictures of those who 'didn't care.' The message was that Jews have enemies, murderous enemies, and should look out." Hier, a skillful fundraiser, networked with the Hollywood célébrité, local politicians, and businessmen and raised large sums of money which he used to expand his operations.

"Tolerance Education" in schools today is practically synonymous with Holocaust education, the Holocaust mythos formulates the center of this liberal consensus that White nationalism is the greatest evil but Jewish nationalism is something we all have to support.

Likewise the ADL was founded in 1913 and incubated by the American Jewish Committee and American Jewish Congress. The well-known Museum of Tolerance was opened in 1993. Speaking of the American Jewish Committee:

American Jewish Committee (AJC) is a civil rights group and Jewish advocacy group established on November 11, 1906. It is one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations and, according to The New York Times, is "widely regarded as the dean of American Jewish organizations".

Besides working in favor of civil liberties for Jews, the organization has a history of fighting against forms of discrimination in the United States and working on behalf of social equality, such as filing an amicus brief in the May 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education and participating in other events in the civil rights movement.

The causality is clear, over a century of Zionist organizations fighting White nationalism politically and culturally tooth and nail every step of the way, while simultaneously demanding unwavering support for Jewish nationalism. That is a unique malice.

The entire reason Krystal is so scandalized by the concept of the ethnostate is because she internalized her Tolerance Education!

The idea that the United States is not and should not be an ethno-state predates 1977.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is in no sense responsible for American civic nationalism. What on Earth are you talking about?

People on here have been commenting a lot about women not showing up for dates, which does sound frustrating, but apparently they're not showing up for each other either. I was reminded of this phenomenon by this Substack post, about women preparing home cooked meals for each other in their homes, then having people not show up last second. So my initial theory that maybe young women are scared of men from outside their social circle is not the main thing going on.

One woman described her bridal shower, where a friend's grandmother prepared an elaborate celebration, but 19 guests cancelled the day of. Only one showed up. The woman said it was embarrassing and dehumanizing.

What's going on?

I tried going to a local ACX meetup, and it was fine, but after six people initially wanted to do it, only two besides myself ended up coming. Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter. I said that I would rather bring my daughter to pick up the paperwork. We fought about it. I was perhaps more prickly than is altogether advisable when speaking to a child's teacher. I tried researching how this could be considered an appropriate thing to, not offer, not ask, but mandate. Something, something, building trust, Head Start, maybe the norms of black Americans? Clearly, they have the wrong order of things. If I trust you, I will invite you over. If I don't trust you, I will want to meet at your office. Even social workers know this. Is this related to parents not actually coming to their appointments somehow? It's juxtaposed in literature withattendance, more than understanding.

Also, meanwhile, my older daughter hasn't been invited to anyone's house. We haven't managed to invite anyone to our house. It seems terribly fraught somehow. I mostly do things with one or occasionally two other families with a stay at home mom and a mom who works two mornings a week, respectively.

Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.

I liked the culture of Georgians (Kartveli) and Albanians that homes are sacred, guests are from God, and that guests and hosts have important mutual roles and responsibilities.

What's the sociology here? Why are Americans like this, despite seeming deeply unhappy about it?

I doubt the fear of men is the main factor here.

The pre-K thing is probably about address verification. Some parents will use a relative's apartment as their address to get their kid into a more desirable school.

mandatory home visit

I'm an American with kids. I have never heard of this. Maybe complain to school administrators.

My private school teachers did home visits in the summers before 1st and 2nd grade. I’ve never heard of a public school doing it though.

I (American) have never had trouble getting people to show up at my home. I suppose more than 0% of all arrangements have fallen through for various reasons, but people flaking regularly isn't a thing.

It is somewhat fraught, in the sense that when people are coming over you want to make sure you have enough time to prepare food and clean the house and do whatever else it is that you needed to get done that day.

American culture is not monolithic, and my guess is that I'm in a different bubble than the people who have this problem.

Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.

Keeping your shoes on in my house after I have asked you to remove them is so incredibly rude that I have trouble taking this seriously.

As a Canadian reading this thread I find people's reluctance to remove shoes hilarious.

If you live in a place that gets frequent snow, and the associated grimey, salty slush as it melts, removing boots/shoes when coming inside is so obviously the correct action.

And then because everyone is used to removing shoes, in the warmer dryer seasons people still do, even though the benefits are more marginal.

The only real exceptions to the "shoes off" rule are things like more formal events, where people are wearing nicer footwear, taking pains to avoid getting them dirty at all, and where extra cleaning by the host is going to be required anyways.

Shoes in the house was thé norm in America until recently, even in upstate New York(with some of the snowiest winters anywhere). But it’s still very rude to refuse to remove them when asked by the host; this is the hicks being, as usual, deliberately strange.

I think New York is seeing sense more and more now though - and bet they're switching to no shoes faster than Texas is (though I have few friends I'm the hotter areas of the US to confirm).

I do think it's been a big change over the past twenty or thirty years among American whites, and that it has a lot to do with the changing role of women and men in the household. Historically, women did all the cleaning/vacuuming/sweeping. So men were unconcerned with making a mess of the floors, it wasn't their problem, and men being dominant in the household they didn't worry about it. Now men share in housework and they're not going to make a mess that they themselves expect to clean up.

I dunno. Both my working-class grandfathers (WW2 vet and Korean vet) were "no outdoor shoes in the house" guys. Adults had house shoes or slippers they changed into and kids ran around in sock feet.

One could just as easily say that women used to stay home and so had plenty of time to clean. Now that they work too, they’re more concerned about preventing messes. That also tracks with who usually seems more worried about people wearing shoes in the house. In my experience, it’s rarely the men.

I might just be overmapping to myself, where i became a strict no-shoes guy once I started vacuuming.

I find it (1) odd for anyone to ask you to remove your shoes and (2) incredibly uncouth to put up any pushback about removing shoes if asked.

(1) odd for anyone to ask you to remove your shoes

I would imagine in most of Europe people remove their shoes so as to not carry around dirt and filth from the outside. I don't think I have ever in my life lounged around someone's home with our shoes on, it's only happens in very brief 'get in, get out' instances.

If you come to someone’s house for a nice dinner party, you take your shoes off? That’s so foreign to me.

Yes, almost always. I think shoes inside was more common in the UK back when I was a kid, but I haven't been to any shoe-wearing homes for a long while. We have dinner parties in socks.

So you wear a dress shirt with dress pants in socks?

The dinner parties I'm invited to don't have quite that formal a dress code, but very possibly yes. There's a line to do with formality and number of people I guess so for something like a pre wedding gathering where everyone is fully dressed up, we would wear shoes.

You put on your smoking jacket and slippers, obviously.

Yes, and put your (inside) dress shoes on.

Tbh I generally just go with whether there's a visible pile of shoes by the door and/or whether my host is deshoeing which is easy enough to calibrate

(1) is more and more popular, I think primarily coming from Asian-American cultures? It makes a lot of sense to me, after a little thought. My kids don't think twice about putting their hands on the carpet while playing. Even my nicest shoes walk outside on sidewalks where birds often poop. "Wash your hands before eating" is the obvious first line of defense here, but "don't touch the carpet with the same surface that touched the bird poop" isn't a bad backup. It's just the same thing everybody who does outdoor work/gardening/etc does with work boots and "mud room" areas for them, but for other outer footwear in foyer/entry areas.

In my culture when I was a kid it would have been rude to remove your shoes in someone else's house without asking, because don't feet smell and don't we need shoes to help cover that up, but it turns out "make sure your feet don't smell" is an acceptable alternative solution for that. The level of work and exercise that can make your feet too sweaty and smelly to walk around in bare socks is the kind that probably already merits a shower for your whole body before lounging around the house, much less social events.

I’m coming from the perspective of footwear as being formal. So I wouldn’t still expect your footwear when coming over for a social call to be muddy or dirty in the first place.

Unless a guest is coming over from an attached house or another apartment unit with direct access to your own, or unless the guest is strictly carried on something where his shoes don't touch the ground, I'm not sure it's possible for the footwear that someone wore while traversing to your house not to be dirty. Even if, e.g. this friend was your neighbor across the hall in your apartment building, he's going to take at least one step in the shared hallway, which will inevitably have some grime from neighbors stepping on it with outdoors shoes, some of which will get on his shoes before entering your home. And someone walking on the sidewalk or on the driveway to/from their car is going to expose their footwear to even more grime than that.

That level of aversion to any dirt seems wild to me. What about socks? How do I as a guest know your floors are to that level of clean?

How do I as a guest know your floors are to that level of clean?

The pile of shoes by the door, probably?

If someone's floors clearly doesn't meet the standard that you find acceptable to walk on with socks, it seems reasonable to refuse to enter without shoes, even if you otherwise find it reasonable to take off your shoes indoors. Much like how if someone's shoes are clearly very muddy or dirty, it seems reasonable to refuse entry to them without taking off their shoes, even if you otherwise find it reasonable to allow people to keep their shoes on in your home.

In typical cases, though, I'd say the dirtiness of shoes that have been worn outside is far beyond the dirtiness of the floor of a household where everyone takes off their shoes in a way that the dirtiness of such a floor isn't far beyond the dirtiness of the socks of a typical person. The former involves bringing dirt from foreign/outdoors/public sources into a private/personal space, whereas the latter is just private/personal dirt being swapped around. Personal dirt can certainly be dirtier/more mysterious than public ones, but in typical cases where people put in effort to taking care of their homes, it tends to be the opposite.

I just think in the main where it isn’t obviously dirty one way or the other, fretting about dirtiness is obsessive.

More comments

Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours.

The operative question would be mandated by whom? State legislature could do that (and states have certainly passed stupider legislation than that). Still, if it is about child welfare, I would rather let CPS handle it. On the other hand, I would be surprised if any courts found that individual schools had the right to mandate home visits.

Also, having a teacher visit every kid at home seems really personnel intensive. Back when I was a kid, if a teacher wanted to speak to the parents of an individual kid, she would tell them to come to her office (but also had no mandate to make them come, though my parents certainly did).

If this is head start, it’s a special program to provide preschool for the children of low income ‘families’(more often single mothers) in ‘disadvanted’(read desperately poor)locales, and is likely to have lots of special rules because it serves the underclass in already quite rough areas on the explicit logic that those people are shitty parents and preschool is less likely to abuse the kid than the (often drug addicted and dating criminals)mother. No idea how Gaashk is qualifying for it(it’s pretty much impossible with a full time male wage earner in the house- and that’s part of the program design), but theres all kinds of other programs that might apply and which might mindlessly ape head start.

New Mexico has been phasing in welfare for all over the past decade or so, so that perfectly ordinary intact median income families qualify for pregnancy and children's medicaid, for instance. As of last year, all state inspected childcare and pre-K is also state funded. So it's basically normal public school, except with some Head Start appendages attached.

It appears to be part of the program design, AI search says they have 90 hours (!) of contract time devoted to this kind of thing, and ten children, so I guess she can put up to nine hours into trying to connect with me this year.

In this case, you always need to remember that the internet and substack is a selected microcosm of especially neurotic and oversocialised people. I am very sociable, with several big groups of friends and acquaintances made of middle-upper classed Europeans, and I have never seen all of this, in particular regarding to women. Everyone loves to show up, especially if is a situation with strangers or not very well know people.

Thank you.

It’s amazing how many things are explained by sampling bias.

Maybe that is the answer.

On Substack, especially, people choose to write about things they want to put several hours into thinking about at one go, so I write about art, but not about parenting or socializing, because my deficiencies are practical, not intellectual. I know what to do, just sometimes I'm frustrated depressed about it.

I've had no such issues or even heard of people having them more frequently IRL. We meet people frequently, our sons go to friends houses all the time and bring home friends. People show up to events no problem, etc.

Have you considered that this is a very unusual community with strange people? The guy who initiated this discussion has a long history of extremely bizarre interactions with other people and women in particular. There is something that isn't being communicated by text here.

People show up to events no problem,

It's possible it's a generational thing, but I remember the era of Facebook event invites where everyone seemed to come to the consensus that "RSVP maybe means no, and yes means maybe". My wife was once particularly frustrated trying to host a small social shindig more than ten years ago where a dozen people (coworkers) said yes, but none showed.

On one hand sure, but for anything even pseudo public people very quickly realised that the events weren't RSVPs, they were advertisements. Engagement was interest, not promises. This was obvious in like '07.

If you want people to show up you ask them directly. If you use a Facebook event you later confirm with people directly.

I think ease of communication and an abundance of competing home entertainment has definitely increased flakiness versus prior eras but also the examples provided seem indicative of very extreme dysfunctional clusters

This person Keturah knows a lot less about the east than she thinks she does, and less about the aristocracy too.

In Japan you are expected not to wear your shoes indoors because they’re unclean (I suspect a callback to when most people lived in the countryside and wore sandals made of straw) and also because they will damage tatami grass mats. You might get offered slippers or you might not, it depends on the place. Certainly nobody is going to wash your feet!

As for aristocrats, they/we don’t go on about taking your shoes off, not because people are expected to want to show off their expensive shoes, but because being fussy about hygiene is considered middle-class and gauche. Like having lace doilies or little silver tongs for the sugar or that little tray for the salt and pepper shaker, or pronouncing valet as if it were French. It’s just a barber pole thing.

I’m reminded of the incident where the Clegg family (Lib Dems, middle class with delusions of grandeur) visited the Cameron’s (PM, Conservative, genuine Scottish aristocracy). Mrs. Clegg was horrified to be given a bottle of Heinz ketchup; she gave an interview later saying as much and talking about how at home they make all the condiments themselves. The Camerons were of course silently contemptuous that Mrs. Clegg expected them to earn her approval by hand-making ketchup. Very much a ‘two worlds collide’ scenario.

Aristocrats also have a large degree of separation in their actual living space for hosting guests and parties/events in their mansions compared to your typical home. When your entire hallway is marble flooring and your mansion is capable of hosting 100s of guests and you actually live in an upper floor and you have servants to clean your home and your events likely have dress codes that's completely different from having guests in your home where your carpeted bedroom is right next to your likely carpeted living room. Do you really need to "signal status" if you're just hanging out with your friends?

What's with the entitlement of "being the guest" anyways? Both the host and the guest should try to be respectful of each other. Frankly speaking, if someone is going to get offended when they're asked to remove their shoes, I don't want them in my home. If you think your shoes are cleaner than my floor then you're delusional. In my home we offer slippers for guests.

Easy thing to do is just copy what the home owner does. They keep shoes on, you keep shoes on. They take shoes off, you take shoes off.

Honestly seems to me that Keturah has an ick against taking shoes off for whatever reason and so wrote an entire article trying to justify that.

As an American: we all pronounce valet as French.

I hadn't realized there's another option.

Yeah, if you watch British shows they pronounce the word rhyming with "mallet". I can only guess that early Americans were trying to be fancy and the pronunciation diverged.

I think early America having a substantial French influence is the more likely culprit.

France was one of the Fledgling US's first allies/trading partners and a good portion of the gulf coast and southern Mississippi had been settled by French speakers before being incorporated into the Union.

Ahh it depends. Your man-servant is valet (rhyming with mallet), when it is to do with cars it is valet (rhyming with ballet).

Oh, interesting. Americans don't have mallet valets, they hire out services, so maybe that's why I haven't heart it.

Interesting, I hadn't seen the latter case. Thanks for the correction!

France did help us with that war of independence.

I feel like I've seen similar phenomena with "guillotine" and "niche." I tried for a while in high school to get people to pronounce the "ll" in "guillotine" like in English instead of like in French, but I gave up because the French pronunciation was too popular. With "niche," that word is niche enough that during the rare occasions it's used, I'm still holding fast to the proper pronunciation of "nitch" instead of "neesch." I recall that, when I was young, "neesch" was kind of a marker of someone trying too hard to sound fancy while actually exposing their own ignorance, but now it seems like "nitch" is becoming a marker an ignoramus philistine who doesn't know that the proper way to pronounce "niche" is "neesch."

Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter.

What the hell? No one gets to enter your home without an invitation (except maybe rent inspections that are highly regulated with advance notice or police with probable cause). Has this teacher appointed themselves as a child protection officer that MUST inspect the living conditions of each and every child? I'd tell them to go pound sand.

We fought about it. I was perhaps more prickly than is altogether advisable when speaking to a child's teacher. I tried researching how this could be considered an appropriate thing to, not offer, not ask, but mandate.

I'd frankly report her to the principal. This is completely unacceptable.

I read the public message from the state program, and it does indeed say there's a mandatory home visit, though I think in this teacher's case she was not delivering the news as intended, because the material goes on about cultural responsiveness and learning about the home culture of the child and building family connections and whatnot. She offered to have me talk to her "manager," whoever that is (she is the only licensed teacher, working in a daycare that is not like that), but I said to just send me an email for now while I consult about our schedule.

I could sort of imagine why it might be a thing, but, also, it is absolutely not culturally responsive to... American culture. And I am in America.

I’m with CertainlyWorse here — is this a mandatory program you have to send your children to for public education, or is this like a preschool with public subsidy or something?

I was in preschool before kindergarten, it was a white house run by a religious group. We played with blocks and there was naptime. No one did a welfare check on my parents’ house. Or if they did, my parents never mentioned it.

Edit: I looked it up, I guess this is a Head Start thing, and it’s mandatory for receiving the funding. It’s true that in America a teacher coming to your house is considered impolite, but the other thing about America is that surveillance of welfare recipients is normalized. There’s no “manager” who can override the home visit requirements. The Head Start program absolutely insists on it.

All the nonsense, as CertainlyWorse puts it, is obviously a welfare check figleaf, it’s transparently so. This isn’t a “black culture” difference thing, unless you count “being a recipient of federal social program funding” as a part of black culture.

What this particular thing sounds like is you’re accepting subsidized pre-K, which is oriented towards low-income families and designed to get children who might not make it to school at all to attend.

You don’t have to explain your financial situation, and I don’t judge anyone for taking advantage of resources in place. But I guess I’m a little surprised that you’re putting your kids in a program that my immediate mental association with, even before looking it up, was poor families while balking at the hoops that US welfare programs put poor families through, which suggests an unfamiliarity with the welfare system that Head Start hews close to. Is choosing a private program for pre-K not an option for you?

Edit 2: Is this actually a private pre-K after all? I’ve read some more and it’s possible that the pre-K you’re applying to also takes money from Head Start, and for reasons that I can presume rhyme with “equity” and “we did research on poor families and it helped”, some pre-Ks apply the same home visit rules to private pay families as to ones receiving the subsidy. That would explain the faintly ridiculous situation. But I don’t know that they’re going to bend it for you, even if that is the case.

It might be worthwhile to find another program, but I know childcare is scarce.

Is choosing a private program for pre-K not an option for you?

No, not really.

For context, I live in New Mexico, which is full of poor people and oil revenue. I had forgotten until I looked it up just now that it produces more than four times as much oil as Alaska, though still half as much as Texas. Unlike Alaska, which gives people money directly, New Mexico invests in various forms of welfare for all, so median income families qualify for pregnancy and early childhood medicaid with no fuss (I was shocked, this is worth tens of thousands of dollars per baby, and I just uploaded a couple of forms, and in the cases of the babies, the hospital uploaded the forms for me). They have a bunch of nice hispanic American ladies (many from the days when the territory literally belonged to Spain) who run nice warm daycares. All the normal daycares are now state funded (with no copay as of a year or so ago), and they have the pre-K program as an optional add-on with more curriculum, or they'll instead pay for regular daycare for four year olds, whatever the individual place decides on doing, which has also been, in my experience, fine. Finding daycare for a 1 year old and a 4 year old at the same time and the same establishment is the main impediment, which has worked out surprisingly well.

This situation has resulted in having a third child, where in another state we probably wouldn't have. As a member of the lower middle class, I like it a lot. If someone institutes low fuss UBI, it will probably be here. And it's democratic without being all that progressive, on account of all the influential people who's parents or grandparents were ranchers, so in general I like it. Also, I didn't save for a house at all, or even think of owning a house, and then a nice local organization said that, yes, we can buy a house, and just led us through exactly how to do that, then sent a non-commissioned realtor who also got up on our roof to show us how to fix the swamp cooler and stuck his hand down the food processor to fish out some broken glass that was inside.

I was more caught off guard by being called up suddenly, out of the blue.

People do often seem to say that crime is pretty high in New Mexico, though, especially around the large towns and cities (and especially around Albuquerque). Are you very rural?

Crime varies a lot from place to place even within Albuquerque. It is relatively bad as a whole, but apparently these days it's not as bad as Gallup (which doesn't surprise me) or Santa Fe (which does). Check out the interactive map here, bearing in mind that lower-population-area results are pretty noisy.

The neighborhood where I grew up gets an "F" today, though StreetView says the only neighbor with bars on their windows is the one who installed them after a break-in decades ago. The worst areas are around the airport, probably because anybody who could afford to live somewhere with less airplane noise did and then the selection effects snowballed from there. There are some high speed roads to get through those areas to the national labs where all the PhDs work, but I know one ex-Albuquerque scientist who left the state after his wife got carjacked, so "just drive past the crime" isn't a foolproof option.

I still have family there, at least in the better areas of town. I don't worry too much about them being victimized and I'd bet @Gaashk will be fine too. Albuquerque's homicide rate is atrocious but it's still better than around 3 dozen other large US cities, the ones you'd expect but also a bunch you wouldn't think twice about unless/until the Eye Of Vince Gilligan turns its pitiless gaze their way.

These charts comparing cities in the Southwest are the ones that stuck in my mind. 2023-24 data, so things might have changed since then, but ABQ is pretty bad. I'd note, though, that the comparison doesn't include Bakersfield, which ABQ recently surpassed for most car thefts per capita and is by all accounts a dreadful place.

Edit: and I'll have to look on a computer later, but everything I'm finding on a quick phone search is saying ABQ still has almost double the crime rates of SF.

I wonder how much that is influenced by locality / microenvironmental factors that aren't shown in the statistics. Eg. Finland used to have a fairly high homicide rate (compared to peer countries) while actually being a very safe place to live as long as you weren't a middle aged unemployed alcoholic male drinking with your buddies.

It's not completely random that Breaking Bad took place there, I will be very concerned and possibly move if my kids seem interested in drugs.

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There's a lot of variance from year to year, especially since Covid (Wiki's list is mostly 2021 data, in which Las Vegas "beat" Albuquerque by a couple homicides-per-100k, but both rates have dropped drastically since), but the Southwest is pretty free from the worst violence hotspots on the whole. After Vegas and Albuquerque the worst time-averaged homicide rate might be Denver, and it's way down the list for cities of its size.

ABQ still has almost double the crime rates of SF.

I wouldn't be surprised. SF has had some really high-profile but limited problems (We stopped bothering to prosecute car break-ins and for some inexplicable reason there was a long rash of car break-ins! After we figured out that crime is just caused by poverty, did anyone remember to tell the criminals?) but even bad enforcement has to do a lot of work to cancel out a selection effect as strong as "being able to afford to live in SF".

Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard it about parts of Chicago as well, and in both places, I don't drive with the windows down or leave my car for large stretches of time or walk alone, and so on.

And funnily enough, it was originally supposed to take place in Bakersfield, but switched to ABQ due to New Mexico tax incentives.

Accidental double post

I've heard it about parts of Chicago as well

Chicago was strongly affected by red-lining. Anecdotally, most of the non-petty crime is strictly limited to the south and west sides of the city. There is very little chance you will just "wander" into the bad neighborhoods unless you are completely oblivious, deliberately or otherwise, to the changing neighborhood affluence markers. It's literally a gradient from good -> bad. The only real exception to this rule is the area around Hyde Park, which is the purview of the University of Chicago. It's smack dab deep in the ghetto, the metra stop for Hyde Park is very rough, but the actual neighborhood itself is super nice, until you cross the street boundary.

I was living on the South Side, and kept going to places like the DMV, or the grocery store, or some cool little fried shrimp place on a bridge, or a nature preserve, and my father in law kept giving me startling strong opinions about the places I had to drive through to get to them.

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One of my swim coaches was stabbed to death in West Mesa. For some reason, despite being a not great neighborhood, West Mesa also had the best pool complex in Albuquerque.

Worst that happened to my family directly I think was a tandem bike getting stolen.

I think the real trouble is in most cities the crime is segregated by neighborhood much more clearly than in Albuquerque, where you can have really great and well-kept infrastructure in an area of town who's name gets Google Autocompleted to "West Mesa Murders."

I'm sorry to hear that! There are occasionally people murdering each other in my area (village/exurb), but only if they get involved in some kind of family feud, or possibly drugs. Drugs are bad in general, but the entire Southwest has bad cartel activity and car thieves.

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Things must be pretty bad for them to mandate something like that. I'd be curious to investigate how this mandatory visit came to be. Is the state program voluntary?

the material goes on about cultural responsiveness and learning about the home culture of the child and building family connections and whatnot.

This sounds like complete nonsense made to be a figleaf for a welfare check. I can't see a teacher flipping out over the importance of 'learning about the home culture of the child' and deciding to die on that hill. They could figure that out over a half hour parent and teacher discussion in their office.

I don't clearly remember how things went down with my previous child, but I think they suggested meeting at my house, I suggested meeting at the school, and she pretty much immediately agreed.

The program itself is voluntary, and my older daughter liked it, so I figured to do it again. They have a bit more curriculum than the regular preschool, which is also completely state funded and exists in the same building. I'm not sure how much more, actually, since the regular program is also run by a large national daycare chain and has official stations and activities. I think it's somewhat based on Head Start, which specialized in teaching poor children with parents who would give excuses about not having transportation to parent teacher conferences or something. I'm not sure about the welfare check side of things, I think it's illegal to enter a home under false pretenses, but maybe they do try to get more district resources by finding all the potential IEP kids or families who want extra services or something. The public pre-Ks here do turn some families away, but are explicitly required to accept all children with disabilities.

Perhaps I'll make the appointment. I was mostly put off by how she kept arguing with me about how extremely REQUIRED it was in an annoying and unwelcoming way, and the short notice.

Yeah, it sounds like it was how the approach was made, which I completely understand. This reminds me of something that happened to me recently. Weird slice of life story incoming..

I rent and had the real estate agent ring me midweek at 5pm saying that the owner wanted to come over to fix a light at 9am the next day. I obviously denied that request, but knowing the owner is literally probably around 60-70 IQ and wasn't being malicious (I've met him before and he basically needs his wife to manage his life for him) I agreed to allow him over the day after.

The Real Estate Agent apologised and we had a bit of a chuckle over it in the end. We've both had to deal with all sorts of strange antics from the owner in the past (not helped by the fact that his Filipino wife is a financially ruthless would-be slumlord and has to be reminded of the tenant laws in our first world country), and they're more on my side rather than the owner's. They consider the couple more trouble than they're worth as clients and have threatened to drop them more than once.

The owner did actually come over to fix the light, but he came with a middle aged friend (which is his usual modus operandi; I've never seen him unescorted). They had to go to the hardware store to get the supplies they needed and the whole drama took up more of my time than I would have liked, as I wasn't going to let them wander around my home without keeping an eye on them.

At the end of the whole thing, the friend asked me how I was at home on a weekday and what I did for a living. My first instinct was to tell him it was none of his fucking business how I spend my time, as he seemed to have presumed that I was unemployed (probably because I hadn't mowed the front lawn in a while). I told him I worked from home in a professional role and he seemed genuinely surprised.

Anyway, I was glad to see the back of them. I was a bit cranky until my girlfriend calmed me down, pointing out the guy's age. I just didn't like people coming into my home and making judgments on how I live my life, no matter how old they are. The PTSD from this incident probably makes me upset on your behalf haha.

I'm a zoomer.

I've had a lot of trouble getting friends to hang out and keep to a set time and place to meet up. Actually, as I think about it, women I've gone on dates with have been better at showing up than my male friends have been at keeping to a hangout time. That said, when friends don't show up, they generally call or text and have an excuse (sometimes a good one, sometimes something you can tell they made up off the cuff), while when dates don't show up, they ghost about half the time, and the other half is split between "has a good excuse and agrees to reschedule" and "has a good-sounding excuse and never indicates a desire to reschedule," with the latter presumably indicating a lack of desire to move forward with the connection.

I had some friends in the neighborhood when I was growing but none of them were good people -- my parents are white-collar professionals but the neighborhood is on the wrong side of town and very working-class, though there isn't violent crime and I never felt unsafe. The neighbor kids to the left tried to steal from me, the girl across the street nearly got away with stealing from me, and the neighbor down the street gave me the sense of a schoolyard bully. I consider that it may not be a good idea to be above the socioeconomic average of the neighborhood, much less to be seen as such.

The kinds of things you see depicted in old movies and TV shows -- meeting friends from the neighborhood, schoolyard playmates, sleepovers, friends calling each other for hours in a night and taking up the phone line, knocking on your friend's door and showing up unannounced, coming over for tea a drink, neighborhood barbeques... none of these really reflect any of my life experience. It seems nice to have that kind of thick social community.

I guess it's a combination of two things. First, Anglo culture in general is more reserved about hospitality than Southern European, Latin, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Asian cultures in general. I can't speak to the careful divisions in Europe, but what I see online suggests the English are more hospitable than the Danish, but less so than the Spanish.

But the English at least have a tradition of having someone for tea, whereas in the US someone comes over and unless a party was prepared for the standard beverage is "uh, I think I have like a flat 2-liter of Diet Coke in the fridge." Americans pour a lot of social emphasis into the event, the party, the special occasion, and there are high expectations indeed for cleanliness, decor, even theme -- the neurotic curse of the middle class. I presume that poorer or more socially transparent cultures are more comfortable with a relaxed attitude towards socializing and entertaining, without the expectations of having a tip-top living space. "Keeping up with the Joneses" runs deep in the American consciousness.

Of course, it's regional, and temperament-based. My aunt from Oklahoma has a large family room and a dining room with many tables, and she has cousins and neighbors and church members and people I don't even recognize coming in and out of her house every time I visit her. She's gregarious, and socially transparent, and you go to her house, and you're family.

She's also a landlady, and most of her work is maintaining her properties (she's a landlady who cleans and maintains the properties herself, sometimes enlisting my cousins to help), so she's home much of the time, and can be socially transparent because she invests much of her time into cleaning and maintaining her home as much as her rentals.

That's probably the biggest explanatory factor -- people's homes and entertaining have traditionally been the provenance of the homemaker, and contributing to third spaces, leading private societies, entertaining guests, and general hospitality were the recognized space for women to hold up the social order. With the entrance of women into the workplace and the two-income trap that makes this a requirement instead of an option, the intertia of middle class entertaining expectations on top of working feels to many like exhaustion rather than pleasure.

"I'm working a 40-hour job, caring for the children, and maintaining the home all at once and my husband doesn't help" (the "double burden") is almost a stock phrase in "why I divorced" stories, and to stack the expectations that people feel about properly entertaining guests on top of those tasks means they're the first to get cut. Not to mention the tension that men and women working 40+ hours a week leaves very little time for anyone to socialize, stacking children on top makes that harder, and then everyone is exhausted and who wants to go do a thing when you could not do a thing, or catch up on sleep over the weekend?

Women from cultures where there is a greater division between men's and women's roles, even if the women in question work or live in a western country, tend to follow that blueprint, and so entertaining and maintaining social connections are higher on the priority list. It isn't irrational the patterns that have occurred, and most people are cutting what I also would cut given the constraints people have been handed, but there are knock-on effects like the decline in entertaining and hospitality.

Mass media also contributes significantly: first radio, then television, then video gaming, now the internet. I'm sure some critics of mass entertainment (which were probably women's groups -- women have been talking about social issues much longer than they've been voting) at the introduction of each of these technologies were sounding alarms about how in the future people wouldn't talk to each other any more, and society would degrade as a result. Cyberpunk as a genre is partially a sustained criticism of the concept of being 'jacked-in' to media at the expense of flesh and blood.

And while the warnings of critics are often overblown or exaggerated, they often have a seed of prescience, even one that is never realized or acknowledged until the time is far too late.

It's easier to entertain yourself now than at any point in history, and when people can entertain themselves, 'entertaining' others feels like effort unnecessarily expended. And given the crunch on time I explained above, why would anyone expend effort unnecessarily?

When the magic internet rectangle supplies nearly endless content, literature, social concepts, news, and parasocial connections with people far brighter, more gregarious, and more attractive than anyone in your immediate social circle, why would anyone go outside and touch grass, or stop to chat with the neighbor? What do I, an introverted Catholic-lite who quotes internet memes the way my forefathers quoted the Bible, who's more familiar with esoteric technical specifications than local restaurants, and whose opinions are so far outside the Overton window they might as well be called defenestrated... well, what do I have in common with my fundamentalist Pentecostal neighbors who hate the Catholics nearly as much as the gays? About what am I supposed to talk to them? The weather? That sounds far less pleasurable than throwing internet comments out into the void at all of you.

I'm a zoomer.

Wait, how does a zoomer end up referencing a game from 1992 (and one of the best games of all time) in their nickname?

In addition to being one of the best games of all time, Star Control 2 also has the unique honor of having been released under the GPL in the early 2000s, under the name "The Ur-Quan Masters" (due to the trademark belonging to the publisher, not the developer, a fact which produced absolutely no problems and embittered legal disputes whatsoever). I encountered it through the open source community where it's talked about as one of the best open-source games. The game is even packaged in debian contrib! UQM may be old, but Linux is taking off among zoomers, and the game has a second life within those circles.

You may or may not have heard that a sequel is coming out, under the new series name "Free Stars." This makes it the third sequel to SC2 to be developed in the past 30 years, but we don't talk about the others. This one is the first sequel by Fred Ford and Paul Reiche, although Paul has since retired.

Linux is taking off among zoomers

Seriously? I'd love evidence to that effect.

Depending on your definition of "zoomer" it's possible I've been a Linux fan since before you were born, but it's almost as likely that I've been hearing "This is going to be the Year of the Linux Desktop!", in decreasing ratios of sincerity to irony, since before you were born. I want to say that the increasing irony doesn't feel like as big a deal as it used to. Maybe that's because these days you can use VS Code on Linux to write Linux software and Windows Subsystem for Linux to run it on Windows, maybe it's because Steam has gifted us with more top-notch Linux games (especially if you include top-notch emulatable-on-Linux games) than I'll ever be able to play, or maybe none of that's my true reasoning there.

There was a bit of a bump in the Steam Hardware Survey, but it's held in the 3.5%-4% range, and there's no real breakdown of how and what demographics.

That said, Linus's "linux challenge" this year went from the normal joke where it seemed like he was intentionally trying to fuck things up, to a pretty serious effort where a handful of the people stuck with it at the end, and I have had actual students actually interested in trying it out.

As a consumer of the tech YouTube space - you see the YouTubers and the viewers really pushing into Linux hard this year, with an uptick in the previous few years.

It's not taking off in the sense that everyone and their cousin are using it, but among the tech-oriented it's become aspirational. Bazzite has generated some interest. The big mover has been Steam and Proton improving the gaming experience, combined with Windows continuing to anger tech-literate users with increasing telemetry and AI features that make people feel like they're the product. At the very least, Linux is often in the air as an option for young techy people, in a way that simply wasn't the case 10, 15 years ago. It's also riding the wave of PC building as a culture, which is dramatically taking off among zoomers, so much so that my sheltered rural cousin constantly bugs me for advice on what kind of PC he should build. In the same way PC building is "take charge of your computer hardware and do it up custom!", Linux for young tech-oriented people is "take charge of your computer software and do it up custom!", with stuff like Arch having an aura of technology empowerment that zoomers of this type find refreshing compared to the app-and-platform 'enshittification' culture of technology right now.

But I'm also in IT, so I see very tech-oriented people all the time. But it's striking that IT (especially in comparison to software engineering) used to be "All Hail Microsoft!" territory, and now, using Windows is considered the "basic bitch" option for personal use even as AD and whatever Microsoft wants to call cloud directory services/Entra this month remains the enterprise backbone.

Bazzite has generated some interest. The big mover has been Steam and Proton improving the gaming experience, combined with Windows continuing to anger tech-literate users with increasing telemetry and AI features that make people feel like they're the product.

I mean, old enough to have Zoomers as children, had I any children, but the first thing I did with my new rig was copy off the default Windoze install and then nuke the drive with a fresh Bazzite install. It's been a ton of fun to play with, and the best part about it is that it's way more trustworthy to me RN than the unholy mess that is Windows 11 and patch Tuesdays randomly breaking $Important_Thing because all M$ cares about is growing its 365 empire, old and decaying x86-based OS monopoly notwithstanding.

You're a Zoomer?! I had you pegged as older than me (late millennial).

I'm very close to the border between the two, and in some ways my personality and temperament is closer to a mid-millennial than my birth cohort. A friend once described me as "an old man in a young man's body."

There's also the complicating fact that for various reasons my parents were relatively late in life when I was born, so both of my parents are very clearly baby boomers. So I had similar parentage to many early-to-mid-millennials, and I'm sure that had an effect on me.

I think a lot of people are basically pretending they have social lives now but in fact spend all the time they can bedrotting with a screen. The men you just don't hear about, they drop out of the offline world completely, but many women still accept invitations from friends, go on dating apps, etc. when they're as stuck inside as a junkie in a traphouse.

my older daughter hasn't been invited to anyone's house.

How old is she? If she has friends she should be getting invited, if not then you have bigger problems.

When it comes to flaking, apparently that's just bay area things. People have to cancel when things come up but in general if somone saw the time and place, and said they're coming, then they put it on the calendar, don't double book something else, and show up. Never been anywhere where this isn't the case.

She just turned seven, so I think it's the age where the protocol was for me to exchange numbers with her parents, they don't do things directly yet, but also I don't want to invite her and her parents, because that gets into awkward adults failing to get to know each other while their kids come over to have something solved every five minutes, which is probably why they also didn't.

But you must! It's not like anyone else magically avoids this initial awkwardness.

How can I? My work schedule completely overlaps with her school schedule. Should I send an invitation card? I don't want people to think it's an event, though.

She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter.

Presumably you want your daughter in pre-k more than the teacher does. What's with the high pressure sales tactics?

Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.

[In the East, guests] are greeted by the host who bends down to remove their guest’s shoes (sandals or slippers), wash their feet, and then offer them a pair of house slippers. The atmosphere is peaceful and clean, a sanctuary from the road — nothing in an eastern home will offend or frighten the guest. This ritual considers the comfort of guests — after a long, dusty walk it feels good to have your feet scrubbed and a fresh pair of slippers to wear.

It's not often you get to see orientalism in the wild in AD 2026. I suppose she has never actually met an individual of the oriental persuasion, much less visited their house, much less visited a house in the orient, and might actually believe that when you attend a party in Shanghai the host will take your shoes off and wash your feet (happy ending presumably not included).

Presumably you want your daughter in pre-k more than the teacher does. What's with the high pressure sales tactics?

I've already signed her up for the Pre-K program six months ago, and would be happy to bring her in without siblings to introduce her to the teacher. It's the local public school, not like the bespoke private ones that are trying to keep the riff-raff out, it seems to be based in some idea from the legislators that it's easier for parents and less intimidating for the child for the teacher to come to them, and with all the language around cultural responsiveness, I want to say that this is not my culture.

Haha, yeah, it sounds more like what a pastor would say about Jesus washing his disciples feet.

Something, something, building trust, Head Start, maybe the norms of black Americans?

Entirely possible. Publicly funded preschool is dealing with a different crowd- and unlike many crowds, this is one where the institution often knows better than the parent(s)(and this is a very different thing from knowing best).

And a reason why one should do as much as one can to keep your kid away from that crowd.

People on here have been commenting a lot about women not showing up for dates

I'll just say that I have never once had a woman not show up for a date after agreeing to a time and a place. Every other popular complaint seems valid, but this one is fake as far as I can tell.

I haven't dated since meeting my wife on the apps (for obvious reasons) but did a lot in the period leading up to that meeting. I only got stood up once that I can remember, maybe twice, in the sense of 'arrive to the location after sending a confirmation text 24 hours before and receiving a positive response' which was then rescheduled for the next day since she overslept or something (It's been a few years, my memories are blurry). I went on approximately 50 first dates in a year, and found that 'girl ghosts/cancels on the 24-hour confirmation text and never meets after setting a time and a date' was maybe 10-20% of the time? It's been years and I did actually have a spreadsheet a few laptops ago, so all numbers are rough

Admittedly after a few months I feel like I got pretty good at filtering for the obviously flaky/difficult, and I was generally pretty fast to offer an in-person meeting upon matching which in my experience tended to scare off the ditherers and completely meeting-adverse. There's a lot of people on Online Dating who are looking for a forever penpal and/or are absurdly fussy about deigning to meet people in the flesh, and I'd say back before I figured out the signs of them/got attractive enough to graduate from 'maybe' to 'yes' for a lot of those women that a 50%+ Flake/Ghost/dither forever rate on date requests was typical.

I only got stood up once that I can remember, maybe twice, in the sense of 'arrive to the location after sending a confirmation text 24 hours before and receiving a positive response' which was then rescheduled for the next day since she overslept or something (It's been a few years, my memories are blurry). I went on approximately 50 first dates in a year, and found that 'girl ghosts/cancels on the 24-hour confirmation text and never meets after setting a time and a date' was maybe 10-20% of the time?

I think some level of this debate has to do with what people count as "flakiness." I've absolutely had "girl cancels on the day before confirmation text," and even "girl ghosts and blocks almost immediately after the day before confirmation text." I have had "cancels immediately before the date with reasonable-sounding excuse," which could turn either into ghosting or a rescheduled date, depending on many factors. I have, however, never been left genuinely stood up at a meeting location, but I also, when I dated, would never go to the meeting location unless I got day-of confirmation.

I also think there might be an element of age and/or attractiveness match level involved here. The men I most associate with making the "women be flakin'" complaints are also, often, the men I associate with "I like 'em young and hot," and, yeah, I'll readily agree that "young and hot" is a walking red flag for flakiness, because such individuals who are also eager to settle down and have a well-adjusted personality often end up in a relationship quickly, and long-term presence in dating indicates pickiness, chaos, or lack of serious desire to practically date. A 22 year old is dramatically more likely to flake, and to do it poorly, than a 29 year old. Men have similar dynamics, and young men are fickle as all heck.

There's also the "what does she think the date is" element. A woman who thinks the date is a hookup or a plausibly-deniable hookup is going to be more likely to flake, because that's a high stakes meeting, and "I'm not feeling it" can override any level of "keep to your plans." A woman who thinks it's low-intensity coffee will be less likely to flake.

All research and talk about online dating for men in the past couple decades has indicated that there's a very skewed bimodal distribution, where the vast majority have little-to-no luck, and a small minority have very good luck. If your experience with online dating is significantly more positive than what is generally perceived by men, then the most parsimonious explanation is that you are in or at least near that small minority.

I stopped doing online dating about 8 years ago, but I had been doing it before that for over a decade and I had normal luck, which would invalidate the theory of a bimodal distribution. If I really wanted, I could get, if I used the online dating sites regularly, a date every couple of weeks and the girl would always actually show up. It didn't usually amount to anything, but that was more due to me than the girls or the dating sites.

This broadly used to be my experience before 2020. It radically changed for the worse after COVID, despite me becoming way more attractive.

Yeah I've been out of the market for a few years now on account of meeting my wife on Hinge, but I did a solid 18 month of Hinge-grinding along the way to meeting her. I've got a decent amount of things going for me in that I'm tall, educated, have a reasonable job, white etcetera but I started the 18 month period as borderline obese and not well-presented and got to being a 7.5/10 or so by the end of it after weight loss, improving my gamesmanship and getting more experience.

I had to deal with way more flakiness and chronic go-nowhere experiences at the start, both since I had way fewer matches initially so I'd tolerate a lot more mixed signals and since frankly I was more interchangeable for the women. By the time I found my wife I was getting frequent matches, plus due to a combination of experience and abundance was way happier to just bail out of a match the second I started getting vibes that I was about to embark on a wild goose chase. If you're a less attractive guy, you're probably going to have to tolerate a lot more nonsense to get anywhere.

I've had it happen to me. Only with girls from dating apps though. Girls I met through any other context would show up 100% of the time.

I'll just say that I have never once had a woman not show up for a date after agreeing to a time and a place.

If you are saying you've never been out and out stood up, my experience tracks with yours. But are you including late cancellations?

There's a gradient that goes from

1 Cancelling the day of, with apologies and immediate rescheduling

2 Cancelling the day of, with a noted drop in enthusiasm in subsequent messaging and a vagueness about rescheduling that seems to be a hint you should stop bothering them.

3 Cancelling the day of, followed by ghosting

4 Ghosting the day of the date (no reply to the "hey, see you tonight at 7" text)

5 Getting stood up, which means her confirming the date then not turning up, leaving you sitting there like a jackass (a): apologies after, sometimes with a dramatic story about a sudden medical crisis, with hospital bed selfies, or (b): full ghosting with blocking/unmatching

2 and 4 are the most common variations. 0 (the date actually happening) happens slightly more often than 5, but less than 1-4. 1 sometimes later results in 0, but more often leads to 2 or 3.

At this point, I am forced to assume that 2, 3, and 4 are her double-booking and going on a date with a hotter guy, or having met a hotter guy in the interim. 5a is anxiety, 5b is, I can only assume, some kind of vindictive game.

Regarding 5, one of my stranger dating experiences was the sole time I was truly stood up. She confirmed an hour beforehand, I arrived at the bar, and she failed to show. No excuses or apologies or claims of a medical crisis, just silence. No response to a "are you on your way" text. I had my beer and left.

Later that day, I texted something along the lines of "wtf happened? Did you die in a car wreck?" She actually responded and said that meeting me at the bar felt too high pressure and she felt uncomfortable. I (flippantly) asked if meeting me the next night at a house I was housesitting would be more comfortable, and she responded yes. As planned, the next night she showed up at a total stranger's house to meet a second total stranger who didn't even own the house.

Baffling.

Can confirm I’ve experienced all of these multiple times as well, although I don’t think I’ve ever been left hanging at an outside venue like a bar or restaurant, since my strategy for most my adult life has been having chicks meet me outside my building or in its lobby (or me picking her up for something like a pool date).

Given increased tiresomeness with female flakiness overtime, I’ve only gotten more ardent about sticking to the strategy. If I’m going to get left sitting there like a jackass, it at least better be in the comfort of my home/hotel/AirBnB.

5a is anxiety, 5b is, I can only assume, some kind of vindictive game.

5a and 5b may be more similar than you think. Girls keep hospital selfies in their photo roll in case they need to bust them out for an alibi such as flaking/ghosting. The outcome of both is the same, wasting as much of your time as possible and leaving you twisting in the wind, making it maximally difficult for you to make other plans at the last minute. It’s a form of merriment for them. Some of them will even brag about it in their profiles: “just here to waste your time.”

Most “amusing” version of this is when it’s near the time of your date or already past it, a girl tells you she’s getting ready and for you to keep an eye out for when she is so you can call her a rideshare. She gives you status updates throughout before finally disappearing. Like an NFL team trying to chew up the clock in the 4th quarter to protect a lead, or a soccer team faking injuries and moving as slowly as possible during stoppage time:

You: let me know when you’re ready so I can send you that Uber at [agreed upon time for date]

*delay*

Girl: hey im getting ready i’ll lyk when I am ☺️

You: cool

*an hour passes*

You: how’s it coming along

*twenty minutes pass*

Girl: great! just had to do my hair, almost ready!

You: sounds good

*thirty minutes pass*

You: almost done?

*twenty minutes pass*

Her: yes! just putting the final touches on my makeup 😘

You: great

*fifteen minutes pass*

You: ready for that uber?

*SHE GONE*

However, sometimes after lengthy delays girls do still follow-through and show-up, so it can be hard to tell ex-ante with certainty if you have a 5b on your hands or not. Gotta play it cool the whole time, lest she gets the ick.

You send ubers to women? I'll offer to pick someone up, I'll split food and drinks but cover the whole tip, or cover the first round or two myself, or some combination of paying for 55 to 80% of costs incurred. Sending cars for them seems like playing into a gross fantasy.

Also, odd that women are so willing to give out their addresses on a first date when 9 out of 7 of them will be date-raped at a frat party while make 70¢ on the dollar.

My wife's sister flakes on dating app guys a lot, which I see as a spectator since I'm living next door to her. Generally more out of pure flakiness, hypochondria and being loathe to leave her K-Dramas than due to swapping to chads or whatever. From what I've seen she's a chronic #2er, but I feel that the more time I've spent with female friends and/or involved tangentially in my Wife's social circle talking about online dating there's just a ton of genuine flakiness and people massively overrate the whole double-booking thing. Maybe I'm overindexing for Asian, non-promiscuous girls who trend a lot more KHHV than serial daters but I know a lot of very timid, passive girls towards dating who'll psych themselves for essentially no reason.

A few times women have been honest and said it was because there was another guy they were more interested in, "sorry, I don't know how online dating works."

I told them it works exactly how they're doing it, just typically with less honesty.

I'm sure that happens but it's more that people have a ton of parallel threads and might be on date 5 with Guy A and Date 1 with Guy B as opposed to straight up double booking individual slots, IMO.

Ah, the selective disappearance of women’s supposedly superior communication and social skills, and ability to read the room.

They know how online dating works, all right. It’s just that a lot of how it works is women jerking men around and wasting men’s time and energy.

"A real man doesn't complain."

I swear almost all Zoomer women have debilitating anxiety. When my department used to go out to lunch every week, I had multiple female Zoomer coworkers ask me to order for them, because they had too much anxiety to order from a stranger. They eventually began to complain if we went anywhere that wouldn’t let you order from a kiosk or iPad, since I and my other older coworkers refused to coddle them in that way. Even the ones who could handle ordering their own food couldn’t handle phone calls. They’d all, without exception, rather cancel an event than spend five minutes trying to work out the details over the phone. And this is even with their friends and coworkers, not people they don’t know. If they can’t figure everything out via text and email, they’d rather skip and stay home. It’s insane.

I think there's a combination of increased anxiety, and also the realization that it's really conversational checkmate for avoiding anything you don't want to do. Once you've declared anxiety it means that whatever's annoying you is a bully who isn't taking into account your situation of need, essentially.

Its common if you date using the apps, which is what I assume is going on.

For what it's worth I've gotten plenty of dates via app and never had anybody say they would go to a date and then cancel at the last minute.

Everyone uses the apps now. Are y'all only swiping right on Flakedy Ann or something?

I think we've literally just had it too good for too long and people have gotten soft. You'd need WW2-style mass mobilization conditions to knock some sense into people.

I guess that tracks with community in former Yugoslavia and the former USSR areas staying intact better.

The case for climate optimism.

Last thread I got in a discussion about global warming and I got a few responses that encouraged me to turn it into a top level post, in the hopes of brightening the day of some doomers and maybe convincing some skeptics of the reality of global warming. Now I don't expect there to be many climate skeptics here but I did get one person seemingly heavily implying it last time so lets quickly go over the basic logic of global warming.

  • Greenhouse gases exist. It's easy to verify that certain gases absorb wavelengths of light that would normally reflect off the earth and go back into space. Absorbing this light causes the gas to heat up.
  • We've been pumping greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, into the atmosphere.
  • Therefore the planet will heat up.

Most people who dispute global warming typically deny the existence of greenhouse gases. Point two is just indisputable and three just follows if one and two are true. Disputing the existence of greenhouse gases is really your only avenue of attack. I'll gladly defend point one of anyone disputes it in the comments but I won't belabor the point here.

Before getting into the meat of my argument I do want to give the skeptics their due. Climate activists often make incredibly misleading arguments they think will promote climate activism but once people find out they've been mislead it just sows distrust in the entire field. Probably the most infuriating one is fossil fuel subsidies. You'll see the claim going around that governments spend 7 trillion dollars subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. But once you look into the numbers you see that the vast majority of these 'subsidies' are not from governments spending money but actually from governments failing to tax externalities. Now, I realize that economists do call these things implicit subsidies but climate activists rarely mention the implicit part and regardless this is not what anyone else uses the term subsidy to mean. Not only does this misleading stat sow distrust in climate activism but it also misdirects it. Most climate activists take it as it's face meaning and think governments are pointlessly shoveling cash into fossil fuels for no reason and all they have to do is to stop that. I hate this argument and wish it would stop being made. Sadly with even wikipedia's own article burying the lede on it I doubt I'll stop hearing it anytime soon.

Okay, so I've been waffling for a bit, what exactly is my argument? I fully believe that by 2030 global warming will be largely solved and by 2040 the issue will be essentially forgotten like the hole in the ozone layer. Now, if you haven't been keeping up with the clean energy and EV industry this might be a very surprising claim, global warming fixed in 4 years? Too good to be true! However I have what I think are good reasons for believing this. First thing to note is what most of our oil goes towards. About 85% goes towards making fuels of some kind and a good chunk of the remaining 15% goes towards things that don't get converted to CO2 like plastics and lubrication. As you might expect from the previous number, the vast majority of CO2 emissions also come from energy. This chart I linked actually massively understates the how much global warming is caused by energy emissions because I'm fairly certain most of the agriculture and forestry slice on that pie is bullshit but I already gave the skeptics their due so I won't go into it.

So, since the vast majority of global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels for energy, either for transportation or electricity, then to fix global warming you'd have to get both transport and electricity off of fossil fuels. I am therefore happy to report that significant and rapid progress is being made on both fronts. For EVs last year about a quarter of all new cars sold were EVs, while the full stats for 2026 aren't in yet for some reason the preliminary numbers are putting it at about a third. It looks pretty clear to me that EV adoption is a standard industry S-curve and we're hitting the nearly vertical section of it. Oh and before you ask, yes, it is mostly full EVs, not hybrids. Even if it were to end here this would already take a substantial chunk out of our CO2 emissions, since 100% of ICEVs emit CO2 citation needed but already about 40% of our electricity is clean.

But speaking of electricity, how has that been going? Pretty well actually, the share of global electricity thats renewable has nearly doubled in since the great recession, even nuclear is having a renaissance, and the rate of growth only seems to be accelerating. All the increase in electricity has come from clean sources, indeed the total amount of fossil fuel electricity is now declining. Why? Mainly thanks to the growth of solar and wind which is mainly thanks to the plummeting price of wind and solar. It's gotten so cheap that developing countries are skipping coal and gas and going straight to solar and wind. Not just are the share percentages similar to EVs but they now seem to be even be growing at similar rates!

You only need to extrapolate these curves out to see that by 2030 the vast majority of cars will be electric and we'll be approaching majority clean energy. All we must do to fix global warming is to keep on the path we're going down.

So, if global warming is mostly solved then what will there be for climate activists to do? Perhaps they'll try to find some other catastrophe to panic about like @JTarrou said, maybe AI. However, notice I said only mostly solved. Transport and energy is huge but theres still going to be a few tough holdouts that'll be difficult to decarbonize. Air travel is the big one, unless solid state batteries pan out in which case it'd be easy, with concrete, steel and nitrogen fertilizer being most of the rest. The latter three are particularly vexing problems but with a ~90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions we'll have plenty of time to figure them out. Regardless of any caveats I hope you dear reader learned something from all this and perhaps even made the future seem a little less bleak for you.

  • Greenhouse gases exist. It's easy to verify that certain gases absorb wavelengths of light that would normally reflect off the earth and go back into space. Absorbing this light causes the gas to heat up.

  • We've been pumping greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, into the atmosphere.

  • Therefore the planet will heat up.

  • Selling copper makes money.
  • I've been stripping down the copper wires in my house to sell.
  • Therefore, I will make money.

This is the major problem with climate theories. They reduce a very complex system down to the simple pieces we are capable of observing, then, arrogantly, assume that this means we understand them. You can prove that greenhouse gases raise temperatures in a greenhouse, but is the Earth a greenhouse? Who is to say what proportion of warming is caused by greenhouse gases? What role is played by oceanic variation, by subterranean thermal forces, solar forces, Milankovitch cycles? We don't have a second control earth, we aren't running controlled experiments, we are simply asserting that the rise in measured global temperatures* is caused by the Greenhouse Effect, because that's the one part we seem to understand.

Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce because I didn't clean my room and I know that makes them angry.

You said that "the vast majority of global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels for energy". This topic works me up a little bit, so I don't want to be too animated, but maybe I can convince you that this is a very dubious statement to be making.

It's an ontological mess. Pig's breakfast. We have no idea what we're talking about. Vineyards were maintained in Greenland for hundreds of years, Mesopotamia used to be the Fertile Crescent. We have no idea what reasonable historical averages really look like. The infamous hockey stick graph is basically a work of fiction, when you look at the methods scientists use to estimate past temperatures they don't match we can read on a thermometer. The entire field of climatology is subsidized by governments and runs into perverse status incentives. The whole field is ripe with the same conditions that feed the Replication Crisis, except that climate papers can't even fail to replicate because there's nothing to replicate. There are precious few actual experiments being done. We don't have a second earth to run controlled experiments on. We have complicated instruments and theories, sure, the scientists all get degrees and wear labcoats. I will grant that it's all done in some seriousness. But ontologically it's not the same as hard, replicable science. It's elaborated wumbology. And you have to believe in wumbo to be allowed to practice. This more closely mirrors the conditions of Roman sacerdotes performing auguries than actual science, which is maybe why climate scientists consistently fail to predict anything.

Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe fossil fuel use goes down and we did it Patrick, we saved the whole town. The earth doesn't burn up, I pitched a perfect game, it must be because I wore my lucky socks. This is fairly basic to the human condition. If climate change goes out of fashion it won't be considered that maybe it didn't matter at all, it will be taken as proof that we understood everything, we solved it. That doesn't really bother me. But I do think that actually this was mostly all a waste of time.

* Let's not even get into all the problems with measuring temperature.

If the various and sundry ecological predictions are correct, then it seems to me there is only one broad course of action: Push nuclear, nuke China and Russia and re-colonize the entire world to keep them from developing in ways that would produce carbon. Anything short of that is ineffective and unserious, according to the current state of climate science. We are already past the tipping point, the ice caps will melt within a century and if we don't start killing billions, there won't be a future for humanity. Naturally, being an American, I favor other billions.

Modestly proposed, modestly delivered.

Or maybe, just maybe, science didn't solve the entire planet's climate model in 1975 and this whole thing is overblown. Good news! Turns out we didn't need to kill all those people after all! Woops!

Push nuclear, nuke China and Russia

Anakin: "Nuclear is the solution for climate change."

Padme: "Because it provides reliable carbon-neutral energy, right?"

Anakin: "..."

Padme: "... right?"

Or maybe, just maybe, science didn't solve the entire planet's climate model in 1975

Considering the science (or Science(tm) if you prefer) can't account for all the emitted carbon with a basic mass/energy balance, I do have some skepticism about the overall climate models that predict doom.

I fully believe that by 2030 global warming will be largely solved and by 2040 the issue will be essentially forgotten like the hole in the ozone layer.

I would share your optimism if the half-life of atmospheric CO2 was a year or two. Sadly, CO2 is a very stable molecule.

Google's AI claims that 50-70% will be absorbed by oceans and plants over 50-100 years. To get rid of the rest, the carbon needs to be transported into the deep oceans or even back where we took it from and this will take even longer.

I could as well say:

Good news, while the propelling charge has been accelerating the projectile to dangerous speeds in the past, the pressure in the barrel is actually rapidly decreasing. Soon the bullet will exit the barrel, and at that point the gunshot problem will be solved because friction will take over and stop the bullet.

CO2 is the gas of life, and the more CO2 we have in the atmosphere, the more dense with life our planet will become. We do not need to get rid of carbon. There is nothing wrong with it.

It is hypothetically possible for the planet to support much green plant life but little or no large mammalian life. Such as plants thriving in hot CO2 but not megafauna such as humans.

The jungle tends to have more mammal biomass, not less, than the poles.

We should make our atmosphere 100% CO2 to maximize life, what could go wrong?

Climate activists often make incredibly misleading arguments they think will promote climate activism but once people find out they've been mislead it just sows distrust in the entire field.

You're right. The first thing that comes to my mind when talking about climate change -- and I'm surprised it's not more well known -- is the Extinction Clock website that compiles failed climate-related predictions, especially relating to catastrophe. (Unfortunately it appears to have been down for months now, so here's an archived version.)

To this day I see climate activists wondering why no one trusts them, and I must be going crazy because that website should be like a mirror to them, and if I were them I would go look in the mirror and see #1 Reason Why People Don't Trust You, Exhibit A. The one way they can have even a small hope of recovering trust in people is if they are willing to publicly admit that their predictions have been wrong and talk about the steps they are taking to ensure being wrong won't happen again. This is the only way, and there is no shortcut. Doubling down further on wrong predictions, and especially tying them to a moral failing on the part of the audience, only sows more distrust.

That's the gishiest gallop I've seen in some time. You've got stuff that's not related to climate change, like the quotes about ozone depletion or the Ehrlich quotes at the beginning or what have you. You have obvious intentional misinterpretions: if you have a quote like "2015 is only six years away, but many experts say that if the world has not reached an agreement to massively reduce greenhouse gases by then, we could pass a point of no return", it obviously doesn't mean that we're at the point of a full-scale visible apocalypse in 2015, just that it would eventually show up if there's not agreement by then without a timescale given for visible events.

You've got misquotes and missing context: the full context for "In relation to the first Earth Day event, quote: "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind"." is "Nobel-winning Harvard biochemist George Wald articulated the fears in a speech later that year at the University of Rhode Island, warning that civilization would end within 15 to 30 years unless immediate action were taken against threats facing mankind, including pollution, overpopulation, and potential nuclear war", and we did indeed take action regarding a potential nuclear war (and other stuff there) after 1970. You've got "could happen" scenarios interpreted as predictions. And so on.

it obviously doesn't mean

It obviously DOES mean to cause distress and prompt significant actions right away.

It's not a gish gallop, it's a collection of hysterical failed doomsday predictions. Of course doomsday predictions don't come to fruition, they never do. The point is to remind everyone how long the same kind of tactics have been used, and how false every manipulative claim really is.

There's no way for you to sweep this away in that manner. Just read it:

The earth has entered a period of climatic change that is likely to cause widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation over the next century if emissions of heat-trapping gases are not reduced, according to experts advising the world's governments.

We're there. We're in a period of climatic change. No hedges, no if-only. We're there, we're in the middle of the period of change.

Except....they go on to describe some of the problems:

At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year.

Balderdash. Complete phooey. Made up out of whole cloth. No beach has lost sixty feet in the intervening thirty years.

Or this one predicting an ice free Artic well over ten years ago:

How long do we have before the Arctic summer sea ice disappears?

Given present trends in extent and thickness, the ice in September will be gone in a very short while, perhaps by 2015. In subsequent years, the ice-free window will widen, to 2-3 months, then 4-5 months etc, and the trends suggest that within 20 years time we may have six ice-free months per year.

And yet, what do we actually see? Over ten years later and we're still waiting for the first ice free day.

and we did indeed take action regarding a potential nuclear war (and other stuff there) after 1970.

But taking measures against overpopulation only made things worse. How should you count the entire list when the list has an item like that?

You only need to extrapolate these curves out to see that by 2030 the vast majority of cars will be electric and we'll be approaching majority clean energy. All we must do to fix global warming is to keep on the path we're going down.

So far as I can see all energy sources are at all time highs in total energy output. Coal is higher than ever before, oil is higher than ever before, renewables are higher than ever before.

Anyway, all clean energy does in climate terms is lower the rate of increase in temperature. CO2 that's up there in the atmosphere stays up there unless we take it out. Electrifying cars cannot help with this.

Plus the climate changes without us. There's oil in Antarctica, it used to be jungle down there. We didn't have anything to do with that!

Fixing global warming means controlling global temperatures directly, not merely adjusting our footprint. There are many ways to do this, mirrors and aerosols and painting things white, adjusting cloud formation.

Aerosols are my preferred approach, mimicking natural cooling effects induced by volcanoes. Aerosols can achieve immediate cooling effects sufficient to halt and reverse global warming at a modest cost of a few tens of billions per year. There are some tradeoffs with the ozone layer and weather patterns that could also be addressed with more effort. But aerosols are an actual solution to global warming, whereas renewables are not.

I think climate change discourse has gone down the wrong direction, there's a certain ecological angle that seeks to reduce human activity in all respects. A more mature approach is to accept that human destiny will not and should not be an unending burden as caretakers for nature. The world is not a national park, nobody is going to pay us to keep it as it was. We are responsible not as stewards but as owners and developers. We have been developing Earth for millennia, it is silly to stop now when the job is incomplete and say 'no further changes'.

Extinction should be avoided except for pests, which should be destroyed. But we could make new species as well. Slashing and burning jungles to make cheap beef is bad - not innately as a desecration of nature but because there are potentially valuable cures and biology there.

Aerosols are my preferred approach, mimicking natural cooling effects induced by volcanoes. Aerosols can achieve immediate cooling effects sufficient to halt and reverse global warming at a modest cost of a few tens of billions per year.

"Stick to the devil you know" was not meant for this occasion.

I gotta go to work very soon so I'll respond to the rest of this later but

Plus the climate changes without us. There's oil in Antarctica, it used to be jungle down there. We didn't have anything to do with that!

This is incredibly misleading. The last time Antarctica was a jungle was when it was way further north, part of pangea and also when CO2 levels were way higher.

There were jungles near the South Pole 100 million years ago, 82 degrees south is pretty much where Antarctica is today: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2148-5

I don't see how it's misleading to say that the climate changes without our involvement when there was rainforest in Antarctica and where-Antarctica-is-now. Plus there was the Ice Age too in more recent history. That was a pretty big deal, nearly wiped us out.

Taking full control of the climate is an important step. CO2 can clearly exert huge environmental changes, the renewables-only approach leaves a lot to unknown chance. If we hit a 'tipping point' then who knows what might happen, we'll be flooded in our trendy electric cars.

In somewhat related news, Ezra Klein had a climate guy on his podcast recently that also painted a fairly bright picture. Which I agree with not only because I don't think anyone has proven to me global warming is bad, but also because I always expected this trend and that we could reverse CO2 levels with ease if we just cut regulations and grew the economy.

And that is what also saddened me about Ezra's guest. Despite being optimistic, he was delusional. Saying that if only we had followed Jimmy Carter's plan in 1978 we'd already have a full EV fleet and solar powering our grid. My guy, we are talking about technologies that have been heavily subsidized for decades, and as a result were over-invested in, and still were failing. Its only when the rest of tech caught up have these things been economical. Alas this is the way of the environmentalist. Take credit for things not earned, lay blame where you caused the issue. Such is politics I suppose.

Alas, I do thing we could probably already be able to suck carbon from the air for essentially free (if needed, which I dont think is proven) if we just eliminated the EPA and most state equivalents.

Unfortunately that guy is right that we could've solved global warming decades earlier but wrong about how it would've been done. The most maddening thing about old school environmentalists is their opposition to nuclear. We could have a totally decarbonized electric grid right now but lead ladden boomers and genxers heard nuclear and thought of bombs.

Nuclear power opposition has probably aggravated the air quality problems we have from burning all that excess coal. It's the most annoying thing about environmentalists.

Nah; we thought of imaginary three-eyed fish and fantasy barrels of glowing green radioactive goo.

IMHO the logical culprit here was the one-two punch of Three Mile Island (where, despite no detectable health effects, we proved the west was capable of screwing up more badly than should have been possible) and Chernobyl (where the Soviets proved that screwing up far more badly could contaminate a thousand square miles and probably lead to early cancer for thousands of people), but emotionally the obstacle to simply improving procedures and designs and regaining public trust was definitely the thought of Homer Simpson in charge of safety and Mr. Burns in charge of waste disposal.

What's your definition of solved by 2030? Aren't there something like 2 billion cars on the planet. Won't it be ~10 years to end of life half of those cars? While we continue to mostly replace them with ICE cars (albeit in smaller proportion). I'm just not understanding how we get to solved by 2030. More like 2045, in this aspect, if EV growth continues through the happy scenario.

Also are renewables significantly reducing the amount of absolute energy that's being produced from fossil fuels, or is it simply supporting new energy demand? One could imagine we do a great job of making more and more of the grid renewable/green energy but still blow our carbon budget because the fossil fuel generation that got us into this situation is being supplemented rather than retired.

I look at atmospheric CO2 concentration and I don't see the line doing anything but going up and to the right.

I look at atmospheric CO2 concentration and I don't see the line doing anything but going up and to the right.

When it goes to the left is when you need to worry, up or down.

I would say solved being peak CO2 emissions. You're right about ICE cars but even at the levels we're at right now it's helping to slow the rate of car emissions. ICE car sales peaked in 2017 and it's been nothing but down since. I'd estimate that by 2030 over 80% of new cars sold will be EVs and the transition from mostly ICE to mostly EV will be quicker than you think. Norway is well ahead of everyone and is already at a third of cars on the road being EVs, hell even china is at one in ten and they started way later.

Also are renewables significantly reducing the amount of absolute energy that's being produced from fossil fuels

Well, if the amount of electricity being generated from fossil fuels is going down, and the number of cars burning fossil fuels is going down, then I don't see how it couldn't be?

Well, if the amount of electricity being generated from fossil fuels is going down

https://www.marketscale.com/industries/energy/solar-hits-87-of-global-power-but-fossil-fuels-still-grew-faster-in-2025

I'm wrong in a worse way. Fossil fuel based generation is not merely being held constant while renewables provide the added demand (still a climate change bad case), but fossil fuel consumption increased as well.

Global total energy supply rose from 592.2 exajoules in 2024 to 600.3 exajoules in 2025, an increase of about 1.4%, according to Forbes contributor Robert Rapier's analysis of the Statistical Review data. Renewables grew nearly 10% in percentage terms, an impressive pace by any measure. But in absolute volume, renewables added roughly 3.2 exajoules while total demand grew by approximately 8.1 exajoules.

There was a third way to dispute greenhouse gases - “the planet would heat up”.

If you if you believe (1) greenhouse gases exists (2) we are pumping a lot of them….it does not guarantee (3) in a complex system. Or more importantly that (3) will be significant versus other modifications like population moving slightly north etc. Or taking other steps that mitigate problems.

The weakest part of the global warming argument was always the create a climate model that is accurate while knowing (1) and (2) are correct. We are simply not good at modeling those things. One thing that has some similarities is the human digestion system and we’ve never been able to model that correctly or entirely explain why humans are getting fatter. And throughout my life on this earth I’ve seen incredible changes on “this is the healthy food you should eat”. The current thing seems to be that I should only eat protein perhaps cooked in beef lard. Sometime in the not so distant past you were suppose to avoid eating red meat.

But 3) is the most well-attested part! It’s the whole reason Al Gore could get up on stage and point to those sawtooth curves. I don’t think I’ve seen an argument that the planet is actually cooler than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

If 3) is hard, the correct response is not to throw up our hands and let God decide. And there are some skeptics out there trying to make their own models say, yeah, it’s alarming but okay. Here’s a feedback mechanism, here’s a reversal, we’ll be alright if we bring back bunker fuels. Stuff like that.

But the mainstream version of climate skepticism is to accuse the people working on 3) of being paid degrowth shills who hate America. You can see it all over this thread. The motte is that spending money on climate research is wasteful and rewards the wreckers. The bailey is that it’s all fake and gay by default. Is that truth-seeking behavior?

I think your food analogy is wrongheaded. What you’ve seen are the fads, the contrarians, the countersignals. The people selling something by contrasting it with a mainstream. Climate science is the mainstream! That’s why so much time and effort has to go into discrediting it! The dynamics are completely different than the market for fad diets.

I honestly have no idea what part of this is sarcasm or an actual argument. I think the use of italics and exclamation marks makes it hard to tell if you are speaking clearly or using them to imply you don’t really believe that argument.

Sorry. No sarcasm was intended.

My understanding is that the warming itself is easy to measure. We have thermometer records going back to the 1800s and reasonable proxies going back further. This would make 3) well-attested.

I do not believe that 3) is controversial. I have seen people argue that 3) was correlated with, not caused by, 2). I have also seen people accept 3) and then propose 4) it won’t be that bad. Those are both consistent positions, and I respect the people who are trying to seriously find evidence for them.

We have thermometer records going back to the 1800s

It's true, but pretty uncommon to have exactly the same thermometer in exactly the same location (within the same environs) for even a few decades -- datasets like HADCRUT are heavily massaged by true believers, and the longest-term measuring locations tend to be in areas particularly vulnerable to urban heat-island and other local effects. Also the areas said (by current models) to be expected to experience the most local warming are sparsely populated (pretty polar) and have limited historical data of any kind.

I'm more "so what" than full-denier -- but I think "we don't really know with high certainty how much average global temperatures have increased since the 1800s" is a pretty viable position.

Well, it's pretty easy to explain why humans are getting fatter, it's because we're eating too much. In fact the changing fad diets all seem to be based on the idea that you can somehow eat your way into not being fat. I suspect this idea might hold some blame as to why people are getting fatter.

Regardless one and two does indeed imply three and adapting to a warmer planet has no bearing on whether the planet is warming, on the contrary it kinda requires it.

(1) and (2) does imply (3) but it’s not always true. Natural systems can have mean reverting systems (or breakout) systems. The amount of food you eat does not strictly translate to getting fatter because most people’s metabolism increases when they eat more so there is a naturally mean reversion. Especially since the AGW story was sold on runaway temperature rises and not something that would have system in place that could cancel out a rising temperature.

You actually do need a nearly flawless model of the earths system to make prediction on more CO2 leading to runaway temperature growth and I have not see evidence that we have really good models on the earth.

I am just point out that (1) and (2) does not mean problematic climate change. That actually takes far more complicated science.

I think it'd be really difficult to fairly test, but the correlation between increasing global CO2 and BMI strikes me as a potential causation that would, if nothing else, be funny. "We're getting fat because average CO2 concentrations have increased 50%" isn't something I've seen tested, even if the linkage isn't understood. IIRC someone here once linked to a study showing that lab mice on the same controlled diets get fatter than they did decades ago.

I'm not gonna defend runaway global warming because I don't believe in it. As far as I can see if it wasn't dug out of the ground and burned then it doesn't contribute to global warming in a meaningful way. Main reason I'm skeptical about the agriculture stuff on that pie chart I linked.

“ I'm not gonna defend runaway global warming because I don't believe in it”

  • Besides from that Mrs. Lincoln how was the play?

Which is why I said initially (1) and (2) don’t really matter but (3) which the model. How the system interacts with itself is all that matters.

That being said for decades it seemed like the real goal of climate activists was drawing in communists/degrowthwers as an angle to attack western civilization. The actual climate models and whether we should be concerned I believe is past human IQ to figure out. So the entire debate was a capitalist-communists fight played out in climate science indirectly that no one understood.

Regardless one and two does indeed imply three

They don't really say anything about the magnitude of three though -- unless you have a good model of the system as a whole, which we don't.

Luckily with that you can just check vs reality to see the magnitude. CO2 levels are currently at 427 ppm over the 280 is was before the industrial revolution, and temps are at about 1.5℃ above pre-industrial. So pretty damn close to 0.01 degrees per ppm.

You... think that global temperature (whatever that even means) has a direct linear relationship with (average) atmospheric CO2?

I'm fairly sure that's an oversimplification...

I don't mean to be glib, but intuiting a linear relationship from correlation in a complex system is famously unreasonable.

Whenever this debate comes up i'm just reminded of so called technical analysis and all the fallacies that come up in it. Just substitute temperature for the price of a stock and you got them all:

  • price is doing this, which means it's going to keep doing this
  • price is doing this in a short time frame, which means it is or will do this in a long time frame
  • price followed this pattern in the past, which means it's going to follow this pattern this time
  • price did a move after this event, so it's going to do the same move after the event repeats

And so on and so on. People just don't seem to have the humility to accept that complex systems are hard to model. That's not to say the climate scientists are necessarily wrong, but it's tremendously difficult to actually make a valid argument either way, and such a small proportion of the debate is that.

No we can't just eyeball it, for the same reason you can't just eyeball your options strategy unless you want to donate all your money to Wall Street.

Yes linear is silly. A lot of it depends on the model which we are not good at. I think some had like Russia permafrost melting and releasing a lot of carbon buried under it which would accelerate heating. I have no idea if that is true. But you could have a model where some natural thing starts happening when temperatures rise which cancels out more carbon.

So the model which is (3) is the dominating part of the equation and without a doubt the weakest part of the science.

Most people who dispute global warming typically deny the existence of greenhouse gases.

I believe that global warming is essentially a hoax. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but the main thing I dispute is that warming due to mankind's emissions will be amplified by a positive feedback mechanism.

So in a sense, I don't dispute global warming. What I mean is that (1) there is little or no dispute that atmospheric CO2 levels are rising due to mankind's activities; (2) since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, one can reasonably expect measurable warming due to mankind's activities. The issue is that according to climate activists, alarmists, warmistas -- whatever you want to call them -- this baseline warming will be amplified to dangerous levels by water vapor feedback. However this claim of amplification, in my opinion, does not stand up to scrutiny. Which means we are left with modest warming as opposed to dangerous warming.

Anyway, as I said, I can't speak for anyone but myself but I suspect that you are attacking a bit of a strawman here. Are you able to identify a few prominent global warming skeptics who "deny the existence of greenhouse gases"?

I've never heard either this objection or anything about water vapor feedback being anything more than a minor contributor. Regardless this doesn't really matter for my point that global warming is nearly solved anyways so I won't focus on it.

As for the second, I remember quite clearly we had someone here that denied greenhouses gases existed, @dale-cloudman, wow it's been 2 years since this guy posted here. Anyways I don't really have any specific examples of popular skeptics explicitly denying greenhouse gases exist but pretty much all of them commonly make arguments that don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist. Mainly quibbling over solar irradiance or how the climate is constantly changing. Since they readily admit to two then the only other way they can argue anything else is causing global warming is by denying CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

I'm not sure is it's talked about in current climate circles, but it's significant in modeling. Models (at least in the 2000s when I learned about this) had a multiplicative factor on climate forcing that was based on a positive reinforcement mechanism from water vapor - in other words, the calculated increase in temperature from CO2 was doubled or tripled because of the assumption of positive reinforcement. Notably, the models did not really model cloud albedo effects, which make water vapor arguably a negative feedback mechanism that stabilizes temperature instead.

Of course, the actual problem was that the models kept all this secret. They were considered proprietary (including the input parameters e.g. 'CO2 forcing' = 3x), so all we the public got to see was the predictions of catastrophe and runaway warming, without any visibility on how those predictions were made. Now that we have a better understanding, it's clear why the predictions of these models were simply wrong, but the trust is quite reasonably lost.

I'm not sure is it's talked about in current climate circles, but it's significant in modeling. Models (at least in the 2000s when I learned about this) had a multiplicative factor on climate forcing that was based on a positive reinforcement mechanism from water vapor - in other words, the calculated increase in temperature from CO2 was doubled or tripled because of the assumption of positive reinforcement. Notably, the models did not really model cloud albedo effects, which make water vapor arguably a negative feedback mechanism that stabilizes temperature instead.

Of course, the actual problem was that the models kept all this secret

I basically agree with all of this, except that I don't think the role of water vapor feedback in climate models was secret in the sense that it was completely unavailable and not discussed. Rather, I think it was a secret in the sense that it was not publicized or emphasized. And why would it be? It's embarrassing to admit that your catastrophic predictions are based on what is essentially a fudge factor.

But either way, there are a lot of people out there who think they know a lot about the global warming debate -- even on a scientific level -- who have literally never heard of water vapor feedback or the role it plays in climate models.

PS I agree that it's actually more likely that water vapor is a negative feedback mechanism than a positive feedback mechanism. Not because I am some kind of expert on climate science, but rather due to common sense about complicated systems. If a complicated system has been relatively stable for a while, the default assumption should be that it's dominated by negative feedback. By analogy, you are far more likely to find a large (loose) boulder on the floor of a valley than on the peak of a mountain.

I've never heard either this objection or anything about water vapor feedback being anything more than a minor contributor.

What? This is basic stuff. Water vapors are even as of now contributing over 50% toward heating. There are other heat trapping substances such as clouds (liquid atmospheric water) is another 25%, methane is 5% and CO2 maybe 20%. There are other important things in the models such as albedo effect stemming from disappearance ice replacing it with earth with different reflection rates. There is a thing of 4,000 gigatons of CO2 trapped in permafrost and microbes etc. in soil.

All these things are part of climate models, they act in nonlinear and unpredictable way, they have their own natural cycle often with different branches etc. Some of them provide some solution, for instance you can trap atmospheric carbon by growing woods, burning them via pyrolysis and producing biochar that can be used as fertilizer, replacement for some construction material such as asphalt or you can use lignin from wood to produce carbon fiber etc.

I've never heard either this objection or anything about water vapor feedback being anything more than a minor contributor.

Respectfully, water vapor feedback is the (or at least A) central issue in the global warming controversy.

Anyways I don't really have any specific examples of popular skeptics explicitly denying greenhouse gases exist but pretty much all of them commonly make arguments that don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist

Ok, then please give me examples of a few arguments made by a few prominent global warming skeptics which don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist.

Since they readily admit to two then the only other way they can argue anything else is causing global warming is by denying CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

I strongly disagree. They could admit that CO2 is a greenhouse gas but take the position that the effects of CO2 have been exaggerated.

Respectfully, water vapor feedback is the (or at least A) central issue in the global warming controversy.

No it isn't? This is legit the first time I've ever heard about water vapor feedback being a major issue. I assure you, in climate activist circles this is just not a thing we talk about. The main catastrophic feedback mechanisms climate activists worry about are clathrate gun, ice albedo feedback and permafrost gas releases. Not water vapor feedback.

Ok, then please give me examples of a few arguments made by a few prominent global warming skeptics

Did you just not see the two I mentioned in the post you're replying to?

They could admit that CO2 is a greenhouse gas but take the position that the effects of CO2 have been exaggerated.

Sure they could but "global warming is happening and caused by humans, just a lot slower than believed" is not a track I ever see anyone take.

No it isn't? This is legit the first time I've ever heard about water vapor feedback being a major issue.

Well, are you saying that you have studied the global warming debate carefully for a good deal of time? (It seems like you are saying something like "If water vapor feedback were an important issue, I surely would have heard about it by now given that I've been following the global warming debate carefully for some time now.")

Did you just not see the two I mentioned in the post you're replying to?

Maybe I missed it? Here's what I saw:

Anyways I don't really have any specific examples of popular skeptics explicitly denying greenhouse gases exist but pretty much all of them commonly make arguments that don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist.

I'm just asking for a couple names of prominent skeptics and links to their arguments which "don't make any sense unless greenhouse gases don't exist."

Because I am genuinely skeptical of your claim that "Most people who dispute global warming typically deny the existence of greenhouse gases."

If you already provided the names and links elsewhere in the thread, would you mind just quoting yourself? TIA.

Sure they could but "global warming is happening and caused by humans, just a lot slower than believed" is not a track I ever see anyone take.

Again, are you saying that you have studied the global warming debate carefully for a good deal of time? It seems like that's what you are saying.

Water vapor feedback is by far the largest feedback; its effect is comparable to CO2 itself, or probably larger.

@omw_68 is wrong in that the water vapor feedback mechanism is very well modeled and understood (unless he's folding cloud cover into water vapor, which does have a lot more uncertainty, including in sign).

I feel like I must exist in a very different bubble to you cause I rarely hear about water vapor feedback. The only catastrophic feedback mechanisms I hear about are the clathrate gun and permafrost gas releases. I'm skeptical of both, especially clathrate gun, but thats besides the point.

I feel like I must exist in a very different bubble to you cause I rarely hear about water vapor feedback

Well global warming is a culture war issue. So yeah, it sounds like you might be in the bubble created by mainstream sources which tend to follow the progressive/leftist/woke party line.

Greenhouse gases exist. It's easy to verify that certain gases absorb wavelengths of light that would normally reflect off the earth and go back into space. Absorbing this light causes the gas to heat up. We've been pumping greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, into the atmosphere. Therefore the planet will heat up.

This is what I would call "motte" global warming. It's very defensible, but the problem (for climate activists) is that if you do the math, it results only in modest global warming, not the catastrophic scenarios described by climate activists. For that, you need "bailey" global warming: The idea that warming due to CO2 will be strongly amplified by means of water vapor feedback. Which gets you the scary scenarios, but isn't supported by the evidence.

Unsurprisingly, climate activists would like to blur the distinction between motte global warming and bailey global warming -- so that they can pivot back and forth depending on what's most convenient.

@omw_68 is wrong in that the water vapor feedback mechanism is very well modeled and understood

I am very skeptical of this, and here's my challenge: Please identify a few instances where prominent climate models of water vapor feedback have made predictions which are (1) actual predictions (i.e. not backcasts or predictions after the fact); (2) interesting; and (3) accurate. TIA.


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