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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35544 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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A new New York State Covid-19 Dataset was released a few days ago. I thought it was a good opportunity to see the progress of the vaccination campaign. I think it's great data for an attack on the performative ritual of getting 'vaccinated' to encourage others to get vaccinated as well (which is what a lot of people were convinced to do). Obviously, those who got vaccinated to "protect other people" stand on shakier ground now.

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-updates-new-yorkers-states-progress-combating-covid-19-467

First, let's establish something important. mRNA vaccines have a established, not fully understood connection to peri-myocarditis. mRNA can cause heart damage in a way that other vaccines seem to avoid. I would say this is an important explanation for the following data:

Percent of New Yorkers ages 18 and older with completed vaccine series - 85.5%

We all know how this was done. OSHA directed mandate, NYC mandate, banning people from shows, restaurants, bars until they receive an EUA injection, healthcare worker mandate, bribing people 100$ a shot. Science communication and incentives couldn't get people to take a novel vaccination method. NYS is almost 20% unionized, and the mandate was really helpful in boosting the low minority vaccination rate, since so many of those individuals work unionized, mandated jobs.

Now that these incentives are gone, let's see what the uptake is:

**Percent of all New Yorkers who are up to date - 14.1%

**

Most New Yorkers ignore CDC guidance now. Covid-19 will be gone in a few years. Covid-19 will be retired as a word for "novel entry of pathogen SARS-2," SARS-2 will be renamed HC-391237 or OC-32871 (random examples) or something, and the "covid-19 vaccine" will be rightly seen as a genetic version of a "flu shot" like intervention.

Consumers who want "flu shot" like vaccines, will eventually come to prefer conventional, protein adjuvanted vaccination methods.

Why would a 19 year old ever get an mRNA injection, when they could get a shot of Covaxin? The main purpose of the shot being to end the harassment from the public health infrastructure, and gain employment or education.

**Percent of New Yorkers ages 0-4 with completed vaccine series - 7.9%

**

This makes me think the vaccine could be seen as dangerous to parents. Keep in mind that all high-risk (on ventilator) children have probably been vaccinated, but some likely have not.

The vaccine campaign was a performance. Young healthy people were asked by the CDC to pretend that genetic Covid-19 vaccination was completely benign and well understood, with the goal of ultimately getting high-risk patients to take the higher risk vaccine.

If 20-29 year olds were allowed to say "no, that vaccine causes heart damage, obviously not worth getting," skepticism would trickle up to individuals who should arguably take advantage of the more advanced vaccination method. May the benefits outweigh the risks. No one believes in "do no harm" in the age of state-mandated genetic injections.

Why would a 19 year old ever get an mRNA injection, when they could get a shot of Covaxin?

Why is your example alternative vaccine Covaxin, which is not available in the US, and not Novavax, which is actually available in the US? Do you think the protein subunit technique used by Novavax is also not a sufficiently old-fashioned way of making vaccines? My understanding is that it looks to be on par with the mRNA vaccines for effectiveness while having much less in the way of side effects, while the inactivated vaccines like Covaxin work significantly worse.

Percent of New Yorkers ages 0-4 with completed vaccine series - 7.9%

This makes me think the vaccine could be seen as dangerous to parents. Keep in mind that all high-risk (on ventilator) children have probably been vaccinated, but some likely have not.

This is an incredible failure of public health messaging. While risk goes down for older children, COVID-19 is significantly more dangerous for children under 4. This CDC table shows triple the rate of hospitalization on somewhat fewer cases.

Novavax is a novel virus-like particle. I personally would much prefer Novavax over mRNA, and probably over adenovirus vectors.

I just don't like the threat of heart problems that mRNA presents. Such a large, dark downside to the products, to remodel your heart.

I thought the adenovirus vector vaccines had a higher incidence of heart problems than the mRNA vaccines. Am I misremembering? I could also see there being a lack of data on head-to-head comparisons given where the different vaccines got used.

This is an incredible failure of public health messaging.

How so? The table you linked shows children ages 0-4 having higher death rates than children ages 5-17, but lower death rates than adults. The stats @Inflamed_Heart_Liberal linked shows children ages 0-4 having higher up-to-date rates then children ages 5-11 and 12-17, but lower rates than adults. This seems like exactly what we would expect from a well- informed population: groups with higher death rates are more likely to be up to date.

7.9% is an extremely low vaccination rate. Normally when people talk about being worried about "low" vaccination rates, they mean 95% or 90%. And COVID-19 is both more dangerous and more common than many of the illnesses we vaccinate children for. If you for some reason decided you had a limited number of vaccinations budget and were rationally optimizing which childhood vaccinations to omit to maximize wellbeing, COVID-19 would not be your first pick (not sure exactly what would be... probably chickenpox? They all suck, this is a terrible choice to be making.). But that's clearly not the optimization people are making; somehow they (and/or their pediatricians) haven't gotten the message that it's actually an important vaccination. And we're going to have a lot more children with long-term health consequences (some of them dead) because of that.

(I'm having trouble finding definitions on their website of what they mean by "up-to-date": the relevant thing to care about is getting the full 3-dose series; past that, for most people, additional doses at best give an ~3 month window of protection from infection, but no significant additional protection from severe disease/death, so the public health benefit is minimal.)

Fair point. There's a lot of public health messaging that gets ignored.

Most childhood vaccines have a 90%+ uptake; I think that's a pretty clear success. While the recent increase in norovirus prevalence shows we could do better, handwashing is at least accepted as something you're expected to do (as opposed to, say, public health campaigns about the amount of alcohol you're "supposed" to drink which no one takes seriously). Talking of vices, smoking has gotten a lot less popular, which probably counts as a successful public health campaign. Not exactly in the same realm, but seatbeats also now fairly widely used.

significantly more dangerous

From an incredibly low baseline, and even then it's still a <1 multiple.

I guess that was part of the show. Vaccines were already so safe and bullet proof, people cannot notice when one that's 10x dangerous is released, and information censored online, and physicians told to be disinterested.

We all know how this was done. OSHA directed mandate, NYC mandate, banning people from shows, restaurants, bars until they receive an EUA injection, healthcare worker mandate, bribing people 100$ a shot.

This isn't how it happened. The greatest period of vaccination uptake was the sweet spot in the rollout period where the vaccines first became widely available, around March, April, and May 2021. After that the growth in vaccine uptake slowed considerably; if it hadn't it's unlikely a mandate would have been put in place. When New York State first announced a vaccination mandate for certain employees at the end of July the state's 2-dose vaccination rate was at 57%; by the time the vaccination deadline hit in late November, the rate was 69%. Even if we assume that absolutely everyone who got vaccinated during this period only did so because of the inducements, it's still only a relatively small percentage of those who got vaccinated.

Well yes. But those last hold outs were the hardest to get. They resisted the "the vaccine protects you from other people" misconceptions of herd immunity being pushed. It's an important percentage, and without mandates, the data gaps would have been ammo for the "dissenters" of public health.

Besides the consensus building (already pointed out) and the highly partisan and inflammatory tone (without corresponding evidence), I take issue with your use of phrases like "genetic injections". Are you implying that mRNA vaccines can modify someone's genome?

obviously

we all know

no one believes

…that something you don’t like could be good?

Look, I understand why you think the mRNA therapies are Problematic. And why you want to talk about them. But I happen to completely disagree with you on the “why” and “how” they were adopted, so I have to object when you bulldoze in and assert that right-thinking people are all on board with your worldview.

If you don’t understand why people might want, or have wanted, the vaccine, especially when they weren’t hooked directly into the same vitriolic channels as you, then you are missing an important piece of the puzzle. And if you won’t understand, as your continued consensus-building suggests…then I think you’re just here to evangelize.

Most of my vitriol came from my education. I've been wear of mRNA since summer 2020 when it was announced as a candidate. I've taken undergraduate STEM, but most importantly, I worked with "science and technology studies," where we looked into a century of scientific ethical dilemmas.

So many people got the vaccine when they were told it would stop transmission - I had read the original clinical paper, and saw this was a messy conclusion. Then data from Israel came out that protection was waning, then the censorship began, and later on the mandating piggy backed on the censorship of waning efficacy.

I don't like when people treat empathy as an all-or-nothing, or when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person. I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all. For example, if something makes someone upset, I can understand their thoughts/feelings if the same thing would make me upset. Otherwise, it's like I'm looking at an alien creature. It's why I've never understood why people get offended at jokes when they know that they're jokes, or why people don't find communism as upsetting as racism, and so on. And on the rare occasion I do think I've modeled someone mentally, I usually end up being wrong.

What would you call this phenomenon? Limited empathy?

I agree with those who say it’s a scale. But I think in most cases either extreme can be bad. Empathy like all other emotions are meant to serve us as rational creatures, and quite often when the emotions take over, extremely bad decisions get made, and it really doesn’t matter whether it’s empathy or anger, they both serve to alert you to a problem, it’s then up to you to solve that problem.

I think the idea of Jordan Peterson is correct that there is a heavily promoted idea of a maternal relationship between the state and the people promoted in the western world, the idea of basically the state and the other arms of culture must snowplow life, must nurture every person, must tell everyone not to be too mean, etc. I think the state shouldn’t force bad situations on people, but I don’t think that means putting up baby gates and padded bumpers lest someone get hurt. I don’t like living in a padded cage. I agree that it’s infantilism to a huge degree and degrading not only to those it’s used on, but for all of society that must be made to protect the absolute weakest rather than reach upward toward something better than ourselves.

Schmittposting? /s

Schmitt's whole gig was that the key distinction was between friend and enemy. I can commiserate when one of my friends has a setback. If they argue in favour of something I believe in weakly or in a cringeworthy way, I can sort of empathize with them. Much less so if an enemy makes a weak argument or embarrasses himself.

Everyone has some kind of Schmittian impulse. Not too many people are sympathetic towards pedophiles or cartel drug fiends. I imagine many pedophiles or cartel drug fiends have or are experiencing pretty poor conditions. But who cares? They're enemies.

Edit: If they think like me then they'll probably be my friend, our beliefs will be similar and we'd probably get along.

It's an instance of the overly feminized rhetoric that is taking over the distributed sense-making apparatus of the West (And some other places).

Women do not naturally gravitate to a manly code of honour. The social virtues that are elevated in women’s groups tend to be things like inclusion, supportiveness, EMPATHY (emphasis mine), care, and equality. Through his and his students’ research on the subject of ‘social justice warriors’, Jordan Peterson has identified that it refers to a real phenomenon in the world, but also suggests that it is specifically related to a maternal instinct: ‘the political landscape is being viewed through the lens of a hyper-concerned mother for her infant.’

This instinct causes all sorts of problems when expressed in an academic or political context. It infantilizes perceived victim, minority, or vulnerable groups (women, persons of colour, LGBT persons, disabled persons, etc.), perceiving them as lacking in agency and desperately in need of care and protection. When persons from such groups enter into the realm of political or academic discourse, they must be protected at all costs. Unsurprisingly, this completely undermines the manly code that formerly held, whereby anyone entering onto the field of discourse did so at their own risk, as a combatant and thereby as a legitimate target for challenge and honourable attack. The manly code calls us all to play to strength, whereas the maternal instinct calls us all radically to accommodate to weakness.

Maximizing "Empathy" is just an aspirational value among the set of many values, nothing gives it authority over good judgment, truth for its own sake, practicality, etc.

Imagine you have a set of problems that maps to a set of solutions, which has corresponding elements in a set of values and male/female coding. If all your proposed solutions are from a certain cluster and does not make use of the mapping, you know some serious bullshit is afoot. And looking at the pattern of the LACK of mapping can suggest which direction things went wrong in. In simple words, if your solution to all problems is the maximization of a female-coded value, then you are being ruled by the Tyranical Mother.

Ever wondered why so few female libertarians? Or why was fun made illegal during the 2019-sars-coronavirus-2 pandemic?

And you don't need to look far and wide for the pernicious everpresent penetration of feminized rhetoric.

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

This is a good post. Thank you. We need to meme the phrase "toxic femininity" as an equal counterpart to toxic masculinity. The traits that "toxic masculinity" exists to criticize do exist, though I'd quibble with the implicit claim that they are prevalent in our culture. Toxic femininity, though..

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

People SKILLS are indeed what makes the world go round. Or at least what get people ahead. But not being a "people pleaser". Being good at technical skills makes you a good field slave, being good at people pleasing makes you a good house slave. The people skill that matters is getting people to follow you. That one is not feminine-coded.

This debate is basically half linguistic where 'feminine' subtly alters through a variety of different meanings whilst without making clear which is meant, best shown by the simple 'feminine = bad'. Is success naturally masculine? What about obstinacy? in the face of evident failure?

Feminine =//= Female. This is the core confusion. When Lieutenant Napoleon kowtows to his superiors it is 'feminine' in the sense that he's not being a brash dictator who attempts to trample over everyone and 'masculine' in the sense that this is the optimum social strategy to achieve his ends. IMO a Platonically 'masculine' man would be absolutely self-assured in all his acts, however wrong, and never go back on anything. This is not a recipe for success of any sort, political, military or anything else.

If you are founder. If you are middle manager the ability is to suck up. Richard Marchinco's corporate style leadership is dead.

Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?

This could actually be unintentionally subversive and black-pilled advice in a way. That, for hiring and/or career advancement, it's better to be a people pleaser (and of the right demographics) than be competent.

Product management is much different than programming—but see for example, the TikTok video of that young female Meta product manager whose day-to-day chiefly involved "[trying] to look cute everyday," literally making coffee ☕, and "me being cuuuutte" (cue brief clip of her dancing on the office rooftop) while vocal frying left and right.

She doubled down on LinkedIn with: "I love romanticizing the daily grind that is my life, being a woman in tech, and being a recent new grad trying to figure everything out. Content creators like myself have the utmost power to influence how young people view corporate life, and working in these popular industries" before rage-quitting her social media damage control when it became too apparent the mockery was defeating the simpery.

Yes, yes—as she has shown, such a grind being a #WomanInTech.

There's a bunch of these sorts of videos going around, but I actually don't think they mean as much as the people highlighting them want them to mean. They all intentionally edit out all mention of the actual work they've done in favor of coffee, lunch, workouts, etc. But honestly, we all do most of that stuff, if maybe not quite as glamorously. We have no idea how hard she's actually working or to what extent she's actually accomplishing useful things.

Aren't they literally just advertisements for work? They get hateclicks and boosts from the "look at these millennial bitches doing NOTHING and getting paid!" crowd, which is a plus, but the true constituency is just getting more and more applications for work to choose from - after all, a lot of people would consider light work for good pay and benefits a great deal, subconsciously or consciously. And the idea that there's a workplace full of cute girls doing girl stuff and having plenty of time to chat is going to be attractive to a lot of men, too, obviously.

Her defense of the video showing her doing nothing yet getting paid, isn't consistent with this hypothesis: Were she merely an actress, making a video which in which true nature of being employed by Blizzard is distorted, she would have said so and be free of any condemation (few would call a person lazy, just because they played a lazy person), but in her defense she never posited she made the video at the behest of anyone but herself.

Empathy is not a binary thing where you either have got it or you don't, but that sounds like a lack of empathy. Understanding is not endorsement. If you struggle to even understand people's emotions unless they mirror your own reactions, you may have an empathy problem.

Treating a spectrum as a binary is a problem. But it's also a problem to treat a minimal amount of something as an acceptable amount. ("All Americans can afford aspirin , so all American have access to healthcare"). Who doesn't even have empathy for people just like them?

I can recognize fear or sadness if it's obvious enough, but I can't understand why the person feels that way or what would stop them from feeling that way. I also sometimes assume that it's being feigned for malicious purposes, i.e. the people who cried in public when Hillary lost in 2016.

I definitely think empathy and sympathy are basically synonymous in public consciousness, and I agree that usually when empathy is mentioned it is actually sympathy that is being called for. Really I think empathy is basically just advanced theory of mind. It's the ability to determine why someone did something the way they did it, and to connect with them through it.

I think it is one of the most vital and integral foundation blocks of the motte. It is both a necessary prerequisite for posting here and something the motte helps us build. That's why I get so annoyed when the mods jump to seeing trolls in impolitic but earnest ops.

This is kind of a shower thought finisher, but I kind of see empathy as male coded and sympathy as female coded. Something in my gut tells me that is right, but then again it might just be that I see women more regularly confuse the two because it's rare to see men mention either, so when I do see a man mention it they are more likely to have looked into it and discovered the difference.

I definitely think empathy and sympathy are basically synonymous in public consciousness, and I agree that usually when empathy is mentioned it is actually sympathy that is being called for.

In political discussion, it's usually neither empathy nor sympathy; it's a demand to turn one's rational brain off and do whatever the person demanding empathy claims is best for whoever they are demanding the empathy towards.

For sure, although I would expand that to pretty much any demand that people engage cognitive faculties.

I think there's a lot of truth to this. A couple years ago, I started mentally replacing "empathy" with "submission" whenever people called for more of the former, and it was almost always the more accurate word in those contexts.

I would say that just about everyone has limited empathy, otherwise we'd all be effective altruists spending our life savings on bed nets in Africa. The point of ethics is more or less to tell us how we should allocate our supply of empathy among various spheres of concern, with a common approach being that in most circumstances we should care less about people increasingly distant from us, but that we should make some efforts towards generalized (in the form of charitable donations, tithes, zakat, etc.) or situational (if we see someone drowning in front of us) concern for strangers.

As we each differ in our native capacities, the best results for society will come from people with too much empathy restraining themselves and not letting homeless strangers sleep in their beds, while people with too little empathy try to sometimes assist or comfort people in obvious distress. It's quite common that a friend or family member will complain to me about something I don't think is a big deal, but I'd be a bad friend or relative if I told them what I really thought.

We all go through life slightly misaligned with the world around us, and the allure of the internet is in part from our ability to find people who think exactly like we do, without all the social frictions of real-life interactions. But unless enough of us decide to start a commune somewhere, we're better off learning how to deal with being a squeaky wheel rather than dreaming about grease.

You're making the all too common mistake of conflating empathy with sympathy. Empathy means the ability to understand where someone is coming from, their persective. Understand what it's like to be in their shoes. It does not mean you have to like or agree with their perspective. That is what sympathy is for, feelings of compassion and pity with someone's position or perspective, implicited agreeing with their plight.

The ability to empathise is always a good thing, at the very least for strictly utilitarian or pragmatic reasons. By understanding someone's perspective and motivations, you can predict how they will act in certain situations. You can better manipulate people. Hostage negotiators do this all the time - they negociate with criminals, empathise with them, understand them and use that information against them. The hostage negotiators don't like the hostage takers or agree with their goals.

when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person

It certainly makes you a less effective person. If we think empathy is a necessary precursor to sympathy (while being distinct phenomena), then that lack of sympathy caused by lack of empathy certainly could be one definition of 'bad'. Being able to forgive people you like is easy. It's being able to forgive people you don't like where true virtue is found.

I do understand the difference, and I do believe I'm capable of sympathy, but not empathy.

Also, on this topic, is there a meaningful difference between empathy and theory of mind? To me, they seem like the same concept and both are things that I lack, but "empathy" is the word people usually use when shaming.

As with many things, there's a large "Who? Whom?" motivation for the types who tell you to "have some empathy."

Generally, they're telling you to have more empathy for the correct groups, where you exhibiting more empathy overall is merely incidental. You exhibiting greater empathy overall by way of exhibiting more empathy for incorrect groups, is of course Toxic and Problematic and some combination of -ist/-ism/-bic (new pronouns?) one way or another. For example, an article we previously discussed on the Motte subreddit ("Foreperson: 3 jurors unwilling to convict Resiles based on race"): Some people can have a seemingly infinite amount of empathy for perpetrators of violent crime—and yet none for the victims—depending on Who? Whom? factors.

I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all.

This is what vast majority mean by 'empathy' mean, they just aren't conscious about it.

What about theory of mind?

I'd second this. And when people accuse others of lacking empathy, what they actually mean is that the others are having empathy for the wrong thing, and they should have empathy for the right thing instead. Again, without being conscious of this. This lack of consciousness on this is a very powerful tool to use for manipulating others into submission, because it allows people who consider themselves generally decent and non-manipulative to do so.

HENRICH's MIRRORS, KENYANS and invincible ignorance

Joseph Henrich, the Harvard professor of evolutionary biology who coined the term WIERD to describe Westerners, and wrote the book on the cultural differences between us and them recently went on Hanania's podcast where he insisted that the Kenyan advantage in running records was... purely a matter of cultural psychology. Having introduced the bizzare lengths to which knowledgeable Academics will go to lie about the most obvious things; and knowing that these taboos have been the sacred in the West for so long, I'd like to propose the possibility that even committed HBDers have only scratched the surface of how far biological differences may go.

With that in mind, let's consider the matter of Kenyan children and mirrors. What matter you may ask? Well, one that might prompt the following, again from Heinrich, et al.

"It is possible but unlikely that these children, up to 72 months of age, did not recognize themselves in the mirror. Although the data presented here do not directly address the question of why they did not show signs of self-oriented behavior, we speculate that these are false negative responses..."

You read that right, standard self recognition testing does not detect self recognition in Kenyan children, a whole three years after it does so in European toddlers, and who knows how much longer.

https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Journal%20of%20Cross-Cultural%20Psychology-2010-Broesch-%20Cultural%20Variations%20in%20Children's%20Mirror%20Self-Recognition.pdf

Now, you'll have noticed that a 5 years of age, even dumb children can be asked questions. Yet for some reason, the study in question shows no sign that these children were ever asked anything about what they saw. In fact the study makers decided to go for another round elsewhere, and leave it at that. Thousands of psychologists are aware of this study, it was even published in Scientific American, and yet no one has publically tried to run it again. If there is even the slightest possibility that this means what It might mean, we are talking about the most important replication attempt in modern history, and it's not even close.

If put on tape, this is the final shot in the HBD wars, and one which even the normiest normie can understand. Any takers? My own prediction is 20% non-recognition, 30% fraud, 20% innate psychological differences in responding to mirrors, and 30% abusive parenting.

Kenyan advantage in running records was... purely a matter of cultural psychology

Just another instance of what I call "propaganda for the future". There just exists too much scientific evidence right now explaining why certain groups are better at certain physical things, it's currently quite inconvenient for those who claim those differences don't apply above the neck when the below-neck differences are cited as a prior.

However, if enough "scientists" assert otherwise, it's only a matter of time before below-the-neck differences are memory-holed as well and you are a racist lunatic for looking at papers about why a certain subset of Kenyans whose ancestors lived in high-altitude areas are better long-distance runners.

He is laying the groundwork for the gaslighting that is about to come. This is independent of the sincerity of his beliefs or intentions.

Progressives have already gotchu, fam. Culture-based explanations to explain differences in athletic performance have been around for decades.

If blacks are disproportionately represented in the NFL and NBA, it’s due to systematic racism that prevents them from becoming doctors and engineers, thus leaving them with no choice but to pursue avenues like football and basketball. Certainly not related to them, on average, having higher leg-to-torso ratios or scoring higher on the Ape Index*, allowing them to run faster and reach farther. The NFL and NBA being disproportionately black is just further evidence that we need to transfer more wealth to and dedicate more opportunities and resources to blacks. However, if head coaches are disproportionately white compared to the players, it’s also due to systematic racism and A Problem that we need to address with affirmative action.

By keeping biological explanations for differences in athletic performance outisde of the Overton window, blank slatists can better keep the more controversial biological explanations for cognitive performance outside of the Overton window as well. Sailer labeled this type of tactic Outpost and Heartland, as a sister-concept to Motte and Bailey. Not only does evolution conveniently stop at the neck, it conveniently stops right below the skin. If some group of Kenyans are better at long distance running, it must be due to a legacy of colonization or something somehow.

The gaslighting will continue until morale improves.

*Wingspan to height ratio, of course. What did you think I meant?

How many of these kids grew up around mirrors? It seems like an obvious issue— if a kid has never seen a mirror he can’t be expected to recognize himself in one.

According to the abstract, another study shows Bedouin children with no mirror access having basically the same recognition rate as Israeli children with mirror access.

I saw this recently on a video on animals that can/can't pass the mirror test. I think that animals interacting with mirrors are fascinating, because it's one of the ways that we can get some sense of their psychology, or at least be reminded by how different we are from them. One of my earlier approximately datable memories is looking into a mirror when I was 3 years old, so it's also something I can relate to my own experiences.

My bullshit alarm fired at full force, especially when the video glossed it as "Kenyans have more of a collective identity". What, as opposed to East Asians?

The video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cKs_iW0QVNY

What, as opposed to East Asians?

Huh, Chinese children mirror testing doesn’t seem to pull up much. Does anyone know at what age East Asians show self recognition in mirrors? Ideally looking for a study with Chinese or Koreans.

Chinese children mirror testing doesn’t seem to pull up much.

Hmm, I couldn't find anything either. I had just inferred that there was nothing to see there, given the focus on Kenyan children. However, I was assuming that they'd tested Chinese children, but from the abstract, the 2011 study apparently just tests Kenyan children, plus those from "Fiji, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Peru... as well as children from urban United States and rural Canada."

So this literature looks even worse than I expected.

Also, I came across this part of the article: "In Fijian culture, for example, there is no “why” phrase that children can use"

I have a low prior in claims of deep linguistic differences between cultures. Sure enough, when I checked their references for that paragraph, they don't mention Fiji. (I might not be searching for the right words.) So this seems to be the sort of "There's an Amazonian tribe with no concept of time" bullshit that people hear at a conference and then repeat, often subtly distorting it.

Also, I came across this part of the article: "In Fijian culture, for example, there is no “why” phrase that children can use"

I congratulate them on baking anti-teleology into their very language.

It’s worth noting Heinrich has a working explanation of why non-westerners would have a harder time recognizing themselves in a mirror for cultural reasons. His unwillingness to engage with HBD is frustrating and probably undermines his point, though.

Yes, but his behaviour and that of the general scientific community towards the issue; is to put it least aggressively, remarkably incurious in a way that suggests censorship either direct, or of the cathedral kind. I have a pretty low opinion of Academics, but even I don't think they are incapable of realizing that even dumb 5 - 6 year olds can understand basic questions. And I don't think they are nearly incurious enough to simply drop research into something as salient as mirror self recognition.

There's something big here.

I agree that the broader academic community has political correctness based reasons to avoid investigating HBD, but Heinrich in particular doesn’t talk about it because he wants to point all evidence towards his grand theory of everything about western/non western social structures.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't his name Joseph Henrich?

lol, you are right. Talk about a name mixup.

This makes me wonder what the state of the art of feminist biology is these days. Once upon a time I got into an argument with a radical feminist who claimed all the observable strength differences between men and women were due to the sexist dietary restrictions women were raised with. That women were starved of the calories and nutrician they'd need to become as naturally strong as they should and could be, which was equally as strong as men.

Even more terrifying was the forum audience that assessed this argument credulously, and thought she was making good points.

Of course, this was a pre-trans explosion argument. I'm not sure what the primacy of trans people in this argument space does. Does it in any way disprove it? Or do you go the ultimate smooth brained route and declare that the existence of trans-women that are just as strong as men proves you are correct?

What was the nature of the forum audience and when was this (If you can be slightly specific without doxxing yourself of course, if not be as vague as you need to be or PM me)?

It was probably 10+ years ago on Penny Arcade.

Charles Murray, and the based NPC question

The romantic view of a dissident involves a person who is simply temperamentally repulsed by the kind of bullshit others peddle, and courageously commits himself to it's refutation. But there is another less romantic, if still mildly endearing version. It's of the person who is fully programmed by what is said explicitly, but somehow deficient enough socially to completely miss the modifiers; the soviet diplomat who hears "Stalin values all legitimate criticism" and is oblivious to the meaning of "legitimate" so he writes him a letter on how communism must end. Hardly a Yudina.

This brings me to Charles Murray. Two days ago, Hanania published his magnus opus on Asian overperformance where he suggested that given the absence of a shared culture; asian overperformance must come from elsewhere. He then intuited that the cause must be a global Kendiist stereotype threat; powerful enough to penetrate North Korea, and maybe even the space time continuum to transform the Chinese before they were stereotyped.

Charles Murray reads the post and responds:

"I was so dumbfounded by this that I read it again to make sure that he really doesn’t mention genes. I’m still not absolutely sure that it isn’t an elaborate put-on. But if he’s serious…wow." Luckily, Ross Douthat was there to clarify things, replying "It's an elaborate put-on". Now think of how bizzare it is that literally the top player in the HBD sphere, is only mildly suspicious that a person positing psychological timetravel with chinese characteristics (admittedly as a potential detraction), might be speaking in jest.

Now you can imagine this guy hearing about freedom of speech from the moment of his birth, genuinely believing that everyone is on his side, and then publishing the bell curve without the slighest idea that it would be controversial. Now, kind of going in another direction - What if similar social deficiencies are present throughout the social science world, and much of what we think of as obvious woke censorship is actually complete social illiteracy?

This of course would complicate my understanding of the issues raised in my prior post. Maybe Henrich upon hearing that 6 year old Kenyan kids don't seem to recognize themselves in the mirror; consciously decides to not dig any further to avoid the gaze of the cathedral. Or maybe, he just doesn't understand that six year olds can answer questions. https://www.themotte.org/post/421/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/78627?context=8#context

I’m not sure what examples of woke censorship are plausibly just social illiteracy.

Is the answer not most if not all of them?

Anything more specific? It seems like woke censorship is often from neuroticism and paranoia, but not so much social illiteracy.

I'd characterize woke censorship as social hyper-literacy rather than illiteracy, since it usually improves the social status of those who call for the censorship. I could see it being illiteracy of a different kind, but not socially.

I would say most regulation of male-female interactions in the workplace involves a certain kind of capitalist autism common to accountants and business consultants. The reduction of man to only appropriate and not inappropriate tasks, the idea that all communication should be essentially "on topic" or "harmless." The idea that parts of your humanity can be checked at the door when you start work and resumed seamlessly upon leaving work. The way corporate capitalism has slowly eaten so much of the dating and broader social world that it is very much in question whether it is possible for the populations involved in an advanced capitalist economy to reproduce themselves.

The commonly expressed media/corporate HR view that it is perfectly reasonable to continuously narrow the circle in which people can meet, with no consequences, is based on social illiteracy.

Now think of how bizzare it is that literally the top player in the HBD sphere, is only mildly suspicious that a person positing psychological timetravel with chinese characteristics (admittedly as a potential detraction), might be speaking in jest.

The comparatively simple explanation is that the mildness of the suspicion is also an elaborate put-on. If you have identified an elaborate put-on that you seek to puncture for one reason or another, the ineffectual, socially inept thing is to run into the town square crying about duplicity: the shameless con artists, idealistic doublethinkers and their naive marks will jointly thumb their nose at you (in reverse order, respectively, for the outrageous suggestion that everything they thought is good is actually bad, for breaking their comfortable illusion, and because the second group will be grateful for the reassurance) and consign you to the loony bin. This sort of "Huh, that's curious. Surely there couldn't be something so wrong in my esteemed interlocutor's theory" affectation of good faith is generally accepted to be the more effective approach.

I think the insight, and I wish I knew who came up with it, is “for the vast majority of people, facts and arguments are not so much about true and false, but social signaling.” In other words, even for social scientists, being right isn’t nearly as important as being on the right side of social questions. And so when confronted with things that contradict a known dogma of the cathedral, they know better than to dig the truth out, as it means being branded a heretic and shunned, denied money, and so on. They don’t even necessarily know they’re doing it, it’s instinct.

I suspect the case of Asians is much like Jews in the West. If you create a culture with a background that prizes study and deep learning and hard work, you can subtly push the genetic needle in the direction of higher intelligence and hard work and dedication to your country and people. Confucian thought was popular in Eastern Asia for millennia (if memory serves, it was first taught in 500 BC), which gives it 2500 years to work on the intelligence and psychology of practicing Confucians. Judaism as we know it started around the same time, and thus would have pushed Jews toward the same killer apps — education (gotta read Moses, and argue about the legal implications of every rule), work, and cultural cohesion. To say East Asian people don’t share any sort of culture is just wrong, they share a history of Confucius, Buddha, and the Tao. They might not overtly share it, and don’t share it in the same way, but they do have that history.

I think the insight, and I wish I knew who came up with it, is “for the vast majority of people, facts and arguments are not so much about true and false, but social signaling.”

Yeah, I get that. The whole point of my post was to wonder whether there are exceptions to this rule, or whether apparent exceptions were just people who got their signals wrong.

It was a shame too. It was a good article dispelling the moderate and conservative mainstream belief that culture is responsible. Transitioning into support for the genetic explanation instead of trolling would have made for a strong piece.

It doesn't even do that.

I'm reminded of another HBD post from a couple months ago (it might have even been one of @Lepidus') where the HBDer's "proof" that blacks were genetically predisposed toward illiteracy was that when the Oakland schools canceled its hooked-on phonics program that the literacy rate in poor (that is Black) neighborhoods plummeted.

In other words when the schools stopped teaching kids to read, the kids stopped learning to read.

The reverse implication being that if you were to drop a Jewish orphan in the woods to be raised by Wolves, he could be reasonably expected to fashion a Yamaka out of moss and would still be reading the Torah by 15.

It was not me. I’d bet on your Jew recognising himself in the mirror though.

I agree that this was a stupid troll. I thought Hanania was better than that, but I guess it was just a lapse of judgement.

what could have given you that impression?

Which impression?

You have to read the full post to get the effect. It goes step by step to point out asian distinctiveness, demolish the idea of a shared culture (admittedly I think he exaggerates this part) and then goes:

"

Granted, stereotype threat as a way to understand the East Asian package has certain difficulties. It would need to explain how stereotypes operate globally, across cultural, linguistic, and political barriers. Somehow, a Korean in Los Angeles and a descendent of Japanese immigrants in Brazil must both know that Westerners expect them to have a certain collection of traits. This influence of stereotype even penetrates foreign countries, including China, despite the best efforts of the government to keep its population culturally isolated from the outside world. Of course, Xi Jinping is no match for the power of global stereotype threat, given that it even made North Koreans good at math. Kendism may also need stereotypes to travel back in time to work since East Asians somehow were already wealthy in the US decades ago, despite China being associated with crushing poverty throughout most of American history. But these are small details for Kendism, an ideology so convincing and scientifically well-established that universities produce glossaries to teach its core tenets. "

Kendism might also need stereotypes to travel back in time to work... but these are small details for Kendism

is really not impenetrably straussian.

I agree it's not very subtle, but it's confusing for a while.

I thought trollishness was his brand? I've never been able to take him seriously. Although, perhaps part of that is he's chosen a picture of himself that clearly makes him look like a monster from a Jim Henson movie.

His wokeness=civil rights law and some of his articles about the “real” difference between liberals and conservatives, whether you agree or not, are definitely novel arguments presented seriously.

His wokeness=civil rights law

In isolation I can see it as a novel argument, but there was something off about the same kinds of people who say "cathedral" every other word entertaining this argument for more than a minute.

Trollishness is his brand on Twitter. This is a deliberate marketing strategy, and apparently it works way better at driving engagement than I'd wish. On Substack, Mr. Hyde transforms back into Dr. Jekyll and puts out some genuinely good articles.

It got a lot of 'likes' and it went viral probably more than a typical post of his, so it was a success in terms of virality. It gets discussion going. You read it once and are like "huh?", and then you get the joke and realize it's kinda clever and then you tell others.

here https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-east-asian-package

Say what you will about Kendi, but he’s given us a framework that can possibly explain the East Asian package. Can it be a coincidence that we see the highest levels of economic growth and mathematical success, and lowest levels of illegitimacy and other forms of anti-social behavior, in countries that are geographically adjacent, despite the limited cultural links between them? And that people from these countries show similar traits when they move abroad? Journalists and academics write papers about low South Korean fertility or remarkable Chinese growth over the years, or about Asian success in American schools, and look for local factors at work, without seeming to understand that they’re observing any kind of broader phenomenon. It’s like if scientists were trying to figure out the association between elevation and weather, and were coming up with an independent hypothesis about the relationship on each continent without ever attempting to synthesize various kinds of data into a more general theory.

Given that conservatives and anti-wokes more generally have done such a poor job of presenting a theory that fits what we see in the world, it is no wonder that Kendism has unrivaled influence. With our advanced modern state of understanding of social phenomena, it remains the only school of thought that has broad explanatory power.

Yes, the last paragraph gives it away as being a joke . It is implied that it is IQ. That is the joke

also his real views on Kendi:

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1636391983622270977

I think there is so much BS online that it becomes hard to even know what is real or not anymore.

Part 1: Da Jooz totally did it (Negro communism edition)

Prologue: David Cole Stein has a wonderful post on how conservatives do best when they 'notice': "Hey look at all the deranged homeless people screaming at you on the subway", but are limited by their own stupid tendency to also promote grand theories for why things happen: "The dems are brainwashed by Chinese communist propaganda". When you combine an observable and undeniable fact, with even a plausible but unprovable theory (and for the record I think CCP propaganda theories are psychotic), you provide people with a social license to dump it all in the trash. Some (Kevin McDonald cough) might find that a small price to pay to be considered Sherlock Holmes. Well, Motters, I'm not gonna let you get off that easy.

Thesis: Jewish elite overrepresentation in destructive cultural movements is not explained by their higher intelligence. It is also a critical factor, perhaps the critical factor in setting these off and shaping the direction these take. When Jewish elites act, they are representing the values of Jews in particular, not merely elites generally. Jews are always willing to go further than general elite opinion.

The Jewish Public vs. The Comparable Gentile Public

The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd), and that the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority. Here are the voting patterns of Whites with college degrees - at the time corresponding roughly in IQ to the average Jew, and Jews:

WHITE COLLEGE GRADUATES - NIXON - 80 - 82% ___ VS ___ JEWS - HUMPHREY - 81%

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-voting-record-in-u-s-presidential-elections

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-may-become-the-first-republican-in-60-years-to-lose-white-college-graduates/

The harmful role of Jewish Elites

  • The Abolition of freedom of association (Shelley V. Kraemer)

In 1948, The US government joined a black plaintiff and their black lawyers in suing to abolish restrictive covenants, which limited the sale of homes to Blacks. Note critically, that restrictive covenants were private agreements between private homeowners; and thereby entirely outside the scope of any plausible interpretation of the constitution. Of course, by US government I mean; Jewish solicitor general Philip Elman, four Jewish lawyers and not a single gentile lawyer. This great dose of Jewish overrepresentation was obscured on the advice of Arnold Raum (take a guess) who said:

It's bad enough that [Solicitor General Philip] Perlman's name has to be there, to have one Jew's name on it, but you have also put four more Jewish names on. That makes it look as if a bunch of Jewish lawyers in the Department of Justice put this out."

The Supreme Court sided with the US Government, and the only mechanism protecting tens of millions of Americans, including 80% of homes in Los Angeles and Chicago; from the carnage that was to follow, was rendered unenforceable. This was single most important battleground of the civil rights movement, and it was won by the enemy before people knew the war was going on.

RETRACTION NOTICE

Boy have I screwed the pooch here. As @Gdanning notes, Cohen was actually arguing for the company's ability to conduct IQ tests, not against it. He also alleges Jewish support for opposing racial quotas in Bakke v. California. I'll verify and update accordingly.

  • School segregation and the other standard civil rights cases**

Here Jewish representation tends to be more balanced, corresponding well to their representation in the American elite generally. Critically however, Jewish lawyers never appear on the anti-civil rights side of a case.

  • The murder of IQ testing (Grigg's v. Duke Power Company)**

Here again, the US government joined the black plaintiff in requesting that the Court establish the precedent that promoting based on intelligence tests would be like providing equality of opportunity "merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox." In other words, presumptively discriminatory unless you could prove otherwise.

Perceptive readers will note that by US government, I mean Lawrence M. Cohen speaking in the name of the US Chamber of Commerce.

Response to Objections:

Readers may note that all of these decisions required the cooperation of a majority gentile supreme court. This is a fair objection but I would note that SCOTUS judges are immunized from repercusions by their lifelong tenure and high status. No one was gonna turn down offering a job to any SCOTUS judge afterwards, regardless of what he did. A lawyer who forcibly integrated your neighbourhood, was a different matter. I don't doubt that there were a few non-jews in the office of the solicitor general who supported Shelley, but only the Jews had the sheer guts to pursue it.

  • -18

Once again, some apparent white nationalist has noticed that lots of elite are left-wing and assumed that's because they're Jewish rather than because the elite are like that.

Once again, some apparent white nationalist has noticed that lots of elite are left-wing and assumed that's because they're Jewish rather than because the elite are like that.

a) I'm actually not cold-hearted enough to be a white nationalist. I'm more of a non-central white supremacist.

b) If you know the elites were only mildly left-wing but Jews were always far-left, and you know that the elite are far more leftwing but Jews remain the most left-wing portion of the White elite, how the hell do you get to 'Jews are only left wing because they are elite?' Which way does time go again?

I don't like the idea of the elite consensus being an emergent property of being elite without it being taken into account what shapes these emergent properties.

As an example, I think it makes sense from an elite perspective to be, to make a long story short, 'pro-Heritage Foundation'. If you own a lot of the economy it makes sense you want 'line' to go up. Simple.

But there are also cases where this doesn't make as much sense. For example, there is nothing self evident about wanting to tear down the old structures or make drastic changes to the order of society. Why would an elite, that is already on top, want to do such a thing? It makes no sense. Unless, of course, the 'elite' sees themselves as an outsider to those structures. Which was the case for the new elite of jews and Catholics that started making up significant portions of the elite in America from 1930's onwards.

The balance of the elite shifted from what it was due to this influx of outsider elites who had different incentives from the old elite of, what was mostly, Liberal Protestants. This led to the many debates and intellectual clashes that made up the culture war of old. Where the 'old guard' stood behind the old structures whilst the new elite was tearing them down and building new ones out of the rubble. The one I'm familiar with, on race, is highly illustrative of this. From Boas and his fraudulent anthropology, that is the bedrock of modern American anthropology. Which helped facilitate the landscape that pushed men like Carleton Coon away. To Gould and his alternative timeline of evolutionary biology and what would later be recognized as completely fraudulent biology. Contrasted with Wilson and his fights against Gould and Lewontin and I think you have, at least in a specific area, a good illustrative example of what was going on at every single level of academia where anyone was putting up a fight against the new elite. And whilst the ratio of old vs new, WASP vs jew, was still balanced enough that you could have an explicit culture war at the elite level, the ratio kept skewing further and further 'new'. Giving us what we have today.

Another illustrative example would be the drastic change at the ACLU. Which I assume most are familiar with.

This wasn't an emergent change that happened naturally because elites are how they are because they are elites. There was a stark change in the demographics of Americas elite. New faces. New races. And the drastic change is not just correlated with this new ethnic makeup and overrepresentation of jews but also corroborated by specific historical examples where these jews ousted the old to make way for a new ideology that better suited their being.

It's hard to write in support of the WASP elite since it, along with the white American middle class, is finally getting what they've had coming for a long time now. And though it may be the fault of the WASP to have ever let the new elite in, ultimately the real driving force behind the change was the new elite.

I think there's a great segment from the linked interview with E.O. Wilson that illustrates the failure of the old mindset:

We had a meeting to take the final vote on Lewontin at Harvard, and a group of the older professors said they were worried about reports of his behavior at Chicago—that he might be disruptive or might have gotten away from genetics, and so would not be the right sort of person to be at Harvard. I made the speech I will regret for the rest of my life: I said we should never accept or reject someone because of their political views. I felt so good about myself making that political speech!

Then I feel like you need to properly engage with the issues of Boas's methodology. The primary one being that his thesis rests on him comparing the faces of children with the faces of their parents to conclude that they are not similar. I had thought most people knew that the faces of children change with age. Sometimes referred to as 'growth'. And that, as detailed in the linked article, the dominant force for all such traits, on closer review, was genetic. Leading to the reason why it is possible to tell the geographical ancestry with of a skeleton with "90% accuracy" from skull alone. And why children take after their parents in one way or another.

The history you bring up has little to do with the point being highlighted in my writeup. The book was review bombed because the climate of anthropology had drastically changed. Being swept up in the Civil Rights culture war where, as you point out, Coon found himself on the side of segregationists.

Coon wrote the book in 1962 after having resigned as president of the AAPA. Coon resigned because a group of anthropologists had pressured him to defame a book that, upon closer inspection, Coon deduced none of them had even read, bar one. It was pure culture war. And the two sides were the classical scientific racists going up against the theories of Boas.

Though it's not important to my main point, since it's not claimed that every single 'member' of the 'new' elite is jewish, nor that every single 'member' of the 'old' is gentile, the biggest opponent of Coon at the time was a student of Boas, Ashley Montagu, real name Israel Ehrenberg.

Doesn't really sound like someone advancing "Jewish interests".

Who are you quoting? Though this is mostly unrelated to what I've been talking about, I'd fall back on Kevin MacDonald and his theory for the specific nature of Boas and his motivations. But to be clear, I made no mention of "Jewish interests" in my original writeup. Which pertained to the new elite vs the old elite, and the difference in incentives between them that could explain the nature of differing emergent elite consensus.

If you have points to make on what "Jewish interests" are and who is advancing them vs who is not then I think you need to flesh that out in more detail beforehand.

Yeah you're right. the ACLU has always been aggressively jewish. I felt the difference was that back then it had to play by old structure rules to get what it wanted with the Civil Rights stuff. Compared to now when it doesn't need to bother with such games. But I think that historical narrative is born more out of mythology than reality.

The early ACLU was a support organization for communist revolution in America. They may have dropped this once the Soviets shook hands with the Nazis, but they seem to have had few qualms about the whole mass murder part. Then again, I'm not sure how Jewish it was back then, so Jews might have actually improved it. This article mentions mainly gentiles.

https://reason.com/2017/12/14/communist-dissonance/

Jewish elites are more left wing than other elites in large part because the factors that reduce left-wing ness among other elites are much less common among Jews- strict religiosity and rural connections are both less common among Jews in general. In particular among Jewish elites, the nature of strict Jewish religiosity suppresses the likelihood of being in the elite in a way it doesn't for Christians, which probably has an additional factor shifting Jewish elites towards the left.

I live in one of the least Jewish (historically or now) countries in the Western world. Jews have had remarkably little influence compared to most other countries, and what influential Jews there have been in Finland have often tended to be right-wingers (such as current MP Ben Zyskowicz, just recently attacked while campaigning for the upcoming election, who notably was anti-Soviet in the 70s when even most Finnish right-wingers would hold their tongue on this subject).

Despite this, Finland has had an armed socialist revolutionary attempt in 1918, one of the strongest Communist Parties in Western Europe during the Cold War era, a very active and influential feminist movement, a flourishing local pornographic industry, an active banking sector full of various speculation and follies etc., just to mention some things were antisemites often blame Jews, and just Jews, for social developments they see as malignant. In none of these have Jews had been particularly important - for instance, I've been able to find just one Jewish member of any influence in the whole history of the Communist Party of Finland, a Central Committee member in 1980s when the party had already split and its influence was fading fast. These institutions have, in great majority, been led and staffed by gentile Finns.

All of this leads me to believe that whatever perceived Jewish participation there is in these institutions in other countries is mostly just a particular niche in institutions that would exist anyway being filled by Jews in numbers greater than what per capita rates would suggest, for whatever reason. However, Jews or not, these still would exist, should the social conditions be such that there's room for them to exist.

In addition, Jewish political donations today are considerable and tend towards socially liberal or pro-Israel causes. This is in addition to their massive structural influence throughout media and the world economy.

See my comment ages ago: https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/37000?context=8#context

Who were the biggest individual political donors to Biden in 2020? Mr Sussman, Mr Simons, Ms Simon make up the top 3. All three are Jewish (Simons is the multi-billionaire founder of Renaissance capital, Sussman founded another finance company and and Simon is a real estate heiress).

Other notable spenders in the election were Bloomberg and Steyer, who ran failed electoral campaigns of their own. Steyer is half-Jewish. Bloomberg is Jewish. On the Republican side we have 'kingmaker' Sheldon Adelson, who was the largest Trump donor in 2016 and probably 2020. Jewish. We've got Uihlein, Griffin, Mellon, Ricketts & Eyechaner non-Jewish. Dustin Moskovitz, Jewish and pro-Democratic. Paul Singer, Jewish (he supported Republicans but also tried to get them to support LGBT). And then there's Soros whose exact donation figures are hard to discern due to it mostly being dodgy websites that discuss it, though probably very large if not the highest of all. Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions for election offices, which is vaguely political. I can't believe it doesn't buy influence, especially in conditions where the format and methods used were in a state of flux due to COVID.

I observe a general trend where extremely rich Jews support Democrats and LGBT - their fortunes mostly from finance or tech. There's Adelson who's on the other side of course (Adelson was most interested in union-busting, marijuana prohibition and pro-Israel action). In contrast, we have gentiles who usually support Republicans and are fairly right-wing. This is from reading their wikipedia blurbs. Of the twelve 2020 megadonors CNN described as 'white', 7 are Jewish. 6.5 depending on how you class Steyer.

There's also such a thing as the 'Adelson primary'! Basically the top Republican candidates compete to see who can be more pro-Israel in foreign policy so Adelson will give them tens of millions of dollars. It's pretty repulsive, even though it looks legal. With stuff like this going on in broad daylight, who needs Scott's Dark Money? The prospect of offending Adelson by some incredibly minor slight gets these high-and-mighty Republicans to bow and scrape.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190207130641/https://news.yahoo.com/millions-at-stake-the-adelson-primary-is-neck-125553624.html

The behind-the-scenes wooing of the Adelsons has been underway for months — a graphic testament to the outside influence that one or two fabulously wealthy donors can have on the presidential race. According to an account first reported by National Review, Jeb Bush initially fell out of Sheldon Adelson’s favor after one of his foreign policy advisers, former Secretary of State James Baker, spoke at an event sponsored by J Street, an American Jewish “pro-peace” group that supports Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The appearance prompted the casino magnate to send word that the move cost the former Florida governor “a lot of money,” while associates of Adelson were quoted as saying that Bush was “dead to him.”

Bush scrambled to make amends. One top GOP donor who is close to the Adelsons told Yahoo News that he quickly got a phone call from Bush distancing himself from Baker. Bush “told me that he [Baker] was just on a list and that he’s never called him for any advice,” said the donor, who, like most others interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified publicly. The donor, at Bush’s request, then passed this along to Adelson. It was “helpful,” the donor said, in mollifying Adelson.

And consider people like Pompeo (then US secretary of state) and their tendancy to go on weird tangents about Israel. It's likely that they're selected for high office precisely because they love Israel (or will at least say and act like they do), by politicians who want to look like they love Israel. How else would you get a Secretary of State who says things like this?

"There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do."

Or Nancy Pelosi:

"If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are"

Their political prospects are surely linked to how pro-Israeli they are, this is the language of sucking up to the boss.

You are missing one really critical thing - why is the situation so? Why the jewish elite in US are so left wing? What follows? How can we flip them on the right? Why is it impossible to flip them ... etc etc.

Throwing selected facts while being vague is a left tactic of character assassination. Because if there is nothing concrete it is impossible to refute or disprove.

I am not saying that generally speaking part of a state elite to not have their interests aligned with state's is outlandish theory. Just be more specific.

You can even I guess make a theory that civil rights era legislation was a mistake. There are enough examples in history that show that when wasp-s lose or loosen the reigns of power, the states develop suboptimally. And the US cost disease and some other social ailments do pick up in the 70s.

Throwing selected facts while being vague is a left tactic of character assassination. Because if there is nothing concrete it is impossible to refute or disprove.

Well, I think I was pretty specific. Specific enough for Gdanning to take a sledgehammer to my work. I don't really understand the rationalist tendency to demand an explanation for a phenomenon before it's existence is acknowledged. It reminds me of the old joke that has a Frenchman saying: "It works in practice, but does it work in theory?" Identifying a group as being the key actor at the most critical points which brought about the destruction of your system seems valuable in and of itself. Ideally, only then should speculation as to motives emerge, otherwise a good story might paper over faulty facts.

Anyway my own position is that recruitment of a considerable percentage of Jews to the right is basically impossible, and risks repeating the NeoCon cycle by which they become gatekeepers within the right, and purge it of it's genuine members. Unlike some other commenters, I'm skeptical of the appropriateness of Anti-semitic discourse given that Jews who hate Western civilization are pretty open about it anyway and can be targeted for their actions instead of their identity and why would we alienate the 10 - 20% who are on our side?

At the same time I think not restricting Jewish permanent immigration earlier was a terrible mistake. For the record, so was turning back fleeing Jews. I don't understand why the only options ever presented are heartlesness or cultural suicide.

Jewish elites are very left wing because they're pretty much all highly educated, urbanized, and religiously unobservant, and disproportionately from culturally liberal locales.

I suspect WASPs from New York City who are highly educated and go to church no more than twice a year have very similar ideological views.

I think there’s history as well, going back to the Bible, basically everyone at some point tried to kill them. So it kinda makes sense that Jews would try to do-opt or join leftist movements under th3 promises of protection. Because of this history, bioleninism would work on them. Being loyal to a regime that promises them safety would be attractive.

I don't know if "bioleninism" is applicable here, though, given things like the reputed high IQ of Ashkenazim and such. I mean, yeah, those ones gotta be careful about who they marry, but still.

The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd), and that the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority.

This part of your text is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. But is it justified?

The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd)

It is true that US homicide rates began to go up around 1965, and the civil rights movement had already been around for at least a decade by that point. But vague chronological proximity does not necessarily indicate causation. And you would need to provide some serious evidence to justify call the racial unrest of the time "a continual orgy of violence and mayhem".

the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority.

I am skeptical of the idea that Nixon's silent majority was primarily motivated by a backlash against violence related to race issues. Is there any more reason to believe this theory than to believe that, for example, Trump voters are mainly motivated by racial crime issues?

Critically however, Jewish lawyers never appear on the anti-civil rights side of a case.

I think this hints a core intuitive objection I have to the narrative you are seeking to weave here. What do we know about the non-Jewish lawyers on the pro-civil rights side of the "standard civil rights cases" you are talking about here? I would wager that some very clear pattern would emerge, which would correspond to a picture that is more along the lines of there being two broad coalitions fighting (urban vs. rural? Moldbug's Brahmins vs Optimates?), of which the Jews overwhelmingly side with one. That picture, though, no longer provides the categorical support for the "civil rights is a Jewish plan against the Gentiles" picture you are seeking to paint (though of course it is not inconsistent with it; a scheme can of course include dupes and Quislings). I would, for example, guess that to the extent non-white lawyers were involved in civil rights cases, they were also all on the pro-civil rights side; yet, most WNs tend to not ascribe enough agency to them to call civil rights a black/brown/yellow/red plot.

All being said, though, even if your thesis is true, so what? If the civil rights movement is indeed a destructive plot by triple-parens them, I can't get myself to think this is particularly immoral, given that they have a pretty solid case for retaliation/self-defense in destroying whatever it destroys. I also don't think I can't oppose it based on self-interest, because I think so far I've been a net beneficiary even taking into account all of its failings and wrong turns and local negatives.

I think Moldbug's categories don't really apply well here. Republicans had generally been pro-some civil rights but drew the line at private property. Democrats hadn't been too concerned with private property, and were pretty statist, but as I noted elsewhere their version of progress circa 1918 was 'eugenics, self determination for competent races and segregation'.

There were pro-civil rights brahmins and anti-civil rights brahmins, pro-civil rights optimates and anti-civil rights optimates. New catholic elites, which don't really fall under either group, but I guess we can call them Brahmins provided we don't foget this is ahistorical were the only other group consistently allied with Jews and blacks.

Yes, obviously the blacks (not many yellows back then) play their role as stormtroopers, but no sane person imagines blacks pulling off the conquest of large chunks of metropolitan America on their own. White Catholics are an important part of the story, but at least their participation on the enemy side was temporary self interest while they integrated and a good half of them if not slightly more are now on the right side. Jews are the permanent Lieutenant and above staffing force for the permanent revolution, and it's not obvious that there are any concessions that could pacify them.

even if your thesis is true, so what? If the civil rights movement is indeed a destructive plot by triple-parens them, I can't get myself to think this is particularly immoral given that they have a pretty solid case for retaliation/self-defense in destroying whatever it destroys.

What did we ever do to them? This is the only country that let Jews in without discrimination, restricting their immigration only when Jewish revolutionaries began rampaging through eastern europe. They've made fortunes here. And now, a country that has done so much for humanity must have all it's cities turned into open air sewers because? Seriously, what have we done that justifies this?

And if what you mean is that Jews are entitled to do whatever it takes for them to feel safe even in the absence of a casus belli, why should we not feel the same way and act accordingly?

I think so far I've been a net beneficiary even taking into account all of its failings and wrong turns and local negatives.

And how is that? Furthermore, shouldn't your reaping benefits from this country engender some kind of gratitude and desire to defend it?

Democrats . . . version of progress circa 1918 was 'eugenics ...

Eugenics was a project of the Progressive movement, which was somewhat more associated with the Republican Party.

a country that has done so much for humanity . . . , shouldn't your reaping benefits from this country engender some kind of gratitude and desire to defend it?

Has it occurred to you that Jews and others who supported the Civil Rights Movement were in fact defending the precise principles which constitute the "so much" that the US has done for humanity?

Eugenics was a project of the Progressive movement, which was somewhat more associated with the Republican Party.

The historical record does not support this claim. The most outspoken proponents of eugenics (Davenport, Kellogg, Sanger, Wilson, Et Al) were all democrats where as the loudest opposition to the same has always come from religious conservatives. IE the sort of people that this monty python bit was inteded to mock.

The most outspoken proponents of eugenics (Davenport, Kellogg, Sanger, Wilson, Et Al) were all democrats

Were they? This says that Sanger voted Socialist, except when Al Smith got the Democratic nominee, whereupon she voted for Hoover. And later she voted for Nixon. I can't find anything re Davenport and Kellogg. And there were famous proponents of eugenics who were clearly Republicans: Teddy Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Most of the Supreme Court justices who were in the majority in Buck v. Bell were Republicans, while the one dissenter was a Democrat. The California forcible sterilization bill passed in 1909, under which something like 80% of the forced sterilizations in the US took place, was passed by a state Senate and State Assembly which were both majority Republican, and the bill was signed by a Republican governor. Clearly, eugenics was bi-partisan.

where as the loudest opposition to the same has always come from religious conservatives.

Surely Southern Democrats were well-represented among religious conservatives at the time

Move over @HlynckaCG, It seems I am a natural Republican after all!

*Doubt*

So by you by your own model Sanger was a socialist who voted democrat. How exactly does that support your assertion that eugenics was a primarily republican movement? Meanwhile Roosevelt and Rockefeller were both considered centrists so what you're saying is that democrats and moderate republicans both supported eugenics while the contemporary "far right" opposed it. FWIW I would actually agree with that characterization, but it is also a direct refutation of the claim you just made, so which is it?

So by you by your own model Sanger was a socialist who voted democrat.

I believe you misunderstood me. I noted that the source says she voted for 1) Socialists; 2) Hoover, a Republican; and 3) Nixon, a Republican. No evidence there that she ever voted Democratic.

How exactly does that support your assertion that eugenics was a primarily republican movement?

I didn't. I said: "Clearly, eugenics was bi-partisan."

Meanwhile Roosevelt and Rockefeller were both considered centrists so what you're saying is that democrats and moderate republicans both supported eugenics while the contemporary "far right" opposed it.

??? Where did I say anything about the far right?

No evidence there that she ever voted Democratic.

...unless we count FDR, Truman, or Kennedy, wich is the fucker of it isn't it?.

Saying that "moderate republicans supported eugenics too" doesn't actually prove your claim, nor does it disprove mine.

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Indeed, the strongest predictor of a religious body's stance on abortion today is their stance on eugenics at the time eugenics was a live issue(interestingly a stronger predictor than a religious body's stance on abortion at the time eugenics was a live issue).

How does the joke go?

Two Jews are sitting next to each other one day. One of them sees that the other is reading a Nazi newspaper. "Why are you reading that? Don't you know they hate us!"

The other responds, "Friend, if I read our papers, they tell us that our people are being harassed and persecuted. If I read a Nazi paper, they tell me that we are in control of the world!"

What did we ever do to them? This is the only country that let Jews in without discrimination, restricting their immigration only when Jewish revolutionaries began rampaging through eastern europe.

You mean like how when Harvard changed its graduation requirements to limit the number of Jewish attendants?

There's a whole (alleged if you want) history of anti-semitism in America.

Also, the relevant factor in them "rampaging through eastern europe" was their communist tendencies, not the Jewishness. This is the thing that bothers me the most, the attribution of actions to race over ideology.

And now, a country that has done so much for humanity must have all it's cities turned into open air sewers because? Seriously, what have we done that justifies this?

Oppressing non-whites, non-straights, non-cis, etc. You understand that the people who were at the receiving end of those actions are going to act against you over them, yes?

Boo hoo, having your access to institutions built by others limited may be unfair but it is not the worst thing in the world. Hollywood gentiles may have similar complaints but everyone just tells them to fuck off; or would if they dared voice them. Getting threatened at knifepoint by a degenerate who asks why u dared set foot in his neighbourhood and knowing that no one will come to help you but you are at the mercy of an 80IQ psychopath is.

  • -10

Nice retreat from "We didn't do anything!" to "Actually, what we did wasn't so bad."

Also, you seem to be forgetting all the actual violence directed from people who were straight, white, cis, and/or male towards those were not, and punished for it either.

This is unnecessarily antagonistic.

Checking your mod notes, it looks like you actually wrote this comment before Amadan modded you for this one (assuming the system isn't lying to me and I read the notifications correctly) but you have put yourself in the difficult position of having multiple bad comments showing up in the mod queue very shortly after eating a ban.

And most of this is downstream of a post that you entitled "Da Jooz totally did it (Negro communism edition)." Like--we get it. You're so edgy! But being deliberately edgy is not really the proper vibe here.

The rest of the post (which I didn't see until post-edit, so it's possible I've missed some things) is not, like, egregiously awful, though it is somewhat evidence-light and "boo outgroup" heavy. But there is a saying about glass houses and stones that I think kind of applies, in a "don't be egregiously obnoxious" sort of way. Posting Chinese-robber type reasoning is always on shaky ground, but when you then follow that up with antagonism toward those who raise questions, this is corrosive to the conceit that we are here to test our shady thinking. I appreciate the retraction in response to the rather decisive empirical counter that was raised against you, but that, too, does not undo the other mistakes you're making more generally.

I'm not going to ban you this time, and I'm not even going to give you a topic ban, but please understand that this kind of posting is exactly why per-user topic bans are so tempting to me. At some point it's like--we get it, you think the Jews are to blame for at least a large chunk of societal ills, but you've shown yourself to be so certain of this that when you post about it, no one can even politely pretend to believe that you are in any way persuadable on the matter. I understand that this is often true of many things people post, but in the spirit of "tone-not-content" and charitable interpretation, we do our best to assume that arguments are being offered in good faith! But that faith is defeasible, and you erode it with posts like this, which in turn strips you of that protection in your other posts.

Next time, you will get a ban, and it's unlikely to be short.

You understand that the people who were at the receiving end of those actions are going to act against you over them, yes?

Doesn't this mean that if you're White you should do everything you can to stop non-whites from getting power as they will act against you?

I mean, I don't disagree. The future of Europe will be an absolute slaughter, but it's unusual to find a Jewish rationalist who admits it.

It took me a minute to realize what tripped my alarms about your post. You seem to be an actual white nationalist at minimum (the capitalizing on "white"), and anti-semitic to boot (assuming that I'm Jewish, which is a bizarre place to jump from so anodyne an observation as "people you hurt will try to hurt you in response").

Given this, I can see why you think people who aren't white can't be trusted with power, because I sure as hell wouldn't trust you with it.

Thankfully, non-whites are not nearly as bloodthirsty as you cast them. There are no equivalent calls for enslaving white people, not in the way that was done to blacks in America. There are calls for reparations and eliminating white privilege, which are not nearly the same. Though you may disavow them, Universal culture is exported by white Westerners for the most part, and just about everyone is willing to jump onto that. I have my gripes about what they sell, but it's a fairly bloodless future.

BTW, I'm not Jewish by belief or blood. You should consider reeling in how quick you are with that sort of accusation, it gives away what kind of mindset you have.

It took me a minute to realize what tripped my alarms about your post. You seem to be an actual white nationalist at minimum (the capitalizing on "white"), and anti-semitic to boot (assuming that I'm Jewish, which is a bizarre place to jump from so anodyne an observation as "people you hurt will try to hurt you in response").

I assumed you were Jewish because every single time somebody says something even mildy critical of Jewish people you jump to their defence. You notably don't do this with White people.

I'm a White nationalist in the same way the average Kenyan is a Black nationalist. Its odd to note the capitalising of White given the capitalising of Black since the George Floyd unrest.

Given this, I can see why you think people who aren't white can't be trusted with power, because I sure as hell wouldn't trust you with it.

"You understand that the people who were at the receiving end of those actions are going to act against you over them, yes?"

Your words, not mine.

Thankfully, non-whites are not nearly as bloodthirsty as you cast them. There are no equivalent calls for enslaving white people, not in the way that was done to blacks in America. There are calls for reparations and eliminating white privilege, which are not nearly the same. Though you may disavow them, Universal culture is exported by white Westerners for the most part, and just about everyone is willing to jump onto that. I have my gripes about what they sell, but it's a fairly bloodless future.

Humans are exactly as bloodthirsty as I cast them, PoC included.

I assumed you were Jewish because every single time somebody says something even mildy critical of Jewish people you jump to their defence. You notably don't do this with White people.

Calling white people a conscious group with shared goals and ideas is absurdly rare here, and even then, it's in a negative manner. 99% of the time, it's being done in an article being posted from elsewhere to mock here. Why would I need to call that out? That's the mainstream opinion anyways.

My motivation when doing so has nothing to do with the Jews and everything to do with what I see as unjustified assumptions/conclusions. If people post unironically here about how the Jews are doing something for racial rather than ideological reasons, I consider that bad reasoning when they don't give sufficient evidence. I do the same thing when I see conservatives do it to progressives here. But that's not because I have a terminal goal of defending Jews or progressives, I do it because I dislike bad reasoning altogether.

I'm a White nationalist in the same way the average Kenyan is a Black nationalist. Its odd to note the capitalising of White given the capitalising of Black since the George Floyd unrest.

There is a whole set of misguided and idiotic literature on why black people should refer to themselves as "Black", but they're clear on how it's a reference to the collective oppression of their race. No such justification exists for the use of "White", it's used tactically in a pro-white sense only by people who are at minimum white separatists.

But hey, maybe you're just like that and think "White" is just about your race's collective experience. But that's wrong anyways, given that a solid number of your fellows are actively involved in destroying you and what you believe in. They don't seem to have that collective experience. The same goes for "Black".

Your words, not mine.

Interesting how you jump to "it will be a bloodbath" when I didn't specify a damn thing. If you want to accuse me of saying it implicitly, I'll formally declare that I am referring to legal and non-violent actions, like demanding reparations/aid or asking white people to "check their privilege" or whatever.

Humans are exactly as bloodthirsty as I cast them, PoC included.

We're talking about America/the West, where that sort of violence is drastically rarer than the rest of the world. This isn't Pakistan where the rule of law is as tenuous as the water supply, the legitimacy of the laws banning violence are taken seriously, to the point where people come with rather serious justifications for why they should be allowed to violate it.

I assumed you were Jewish because every single time somebody says something even mildy critical of Jewish people you jump to their defence. You notably don't do this with White people.

This is why you should stick to addressing the things people say, and not projecting identities onto them and responding to them based on what you assume those identities to be.

You're being unnecessarily personal and antagonistic, and "you sound Jewish," in so many words, is obnoxious. Stop it.

All being said, though, even if your thesis is true, so what? If the civil rights movement is indeed a destructive plot by triple-parens them, I can't get myself to think this is particularly immoral, given that they have a pretty solid case for retaliation/self-defense in destroying whatever it destroys. I also don't think I can't oppose it based on self-interest, because I think so far I've been a net beneficiary even taking into account all of its failings and wrong turns and local negatives.

I am not on board lepidus's claims in any real way, but I have seen several conservative rabbis make points that are...similar to his. Their points have generally boiled down to something like, "Jews are so overwhelmingly irrationally afraid of white gentiles oppressing them, that they will enable any outside force to be against that force, no matter how self destructive." I first saw this point right after 9/11 when a lot of progressive Jews were on the "stop Muslim hate" train, and they would be pointing out quietly that Jews would be pretty screwed if Islam became a political force in the US. I saw some similar takes after Trump took office. But conservative rabbis represent a very small % of Jews.

Their points have generally boiled down to something like, "Jews are so overwhelmingly irrationally afraid of white gentiles oppressing them, that they will enable any outside force to be against that force, no matter how self destructive."

Probably has to do with context. Islam in America doesn't seem very attuned to the more fundamentalist preaching exported from Saudi Arabia. Cases of Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so.

Cases of Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so.

There are relatively few Muslims in the US. But quite a few Muslim terrorist incidents. And plenty of smaller incidents where Muslims and Jews are in proximity, such as NYC, though these don't seem to be tracked on a national level.

I'm seeing 15 on Wikipedia for the US, that seems rare to me. Also, what's the source on the Muslim-Jew incidents?

What do you mean, rare? The boogeyman of the left, white nationalism is at 11, if wiki is the scale we're using.

Some of the other categories contain even more islamic perps, like antisemitic, and palestininan terrorism. Not to mention islamic terrorism did by far the most victims, outweighing all other forms of terrorism combined.

Even the 2017 study, ignoring the twin elephants in the room, comes to that conclusion:

A 2017 report by The Nation Institute and the Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed a list of the terrorist incidents which occurred in the US between 2008 and 2016.[24] It found:[25]

115 far-right inspired terrorist incidents. 35% of these incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 29% of them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 79 deaths.

63 Islamist inspired terrorist incidents. 76% of these terrorist incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 13% of them resulted in fatalities. These incidents caused 90 deaths.

19 far-left inspired terrorist incidents. 20% of these terrorist incidents were foiled (this number means that no terrorist attacks occurred) and 10% of them resulted in fatalities. Two of these incidents were described as "plausibly" attributed to a perpetrator with left-wing sympathies and caused 7 deaths. These are not included in the official government database.[26]

The article wiki uses as source here is confused. Its central, vehement point is that far more resources should be devoted to far-right terrorism, yet its own (and in my opinion, already cherry-picked) statistics show that despite the government's focus on islamic terrorism, it remains the greater threat. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly equalized all forms of terrorism to foil 55% (the mean of the two threats) : far-right deaths would be reduced by 24, islamic deaths would jump by 79.

Suspiciously absent from that wikipedia article are black supremacist attacks, like waukesha. And the dallas and NY police killings (quote from a perp: "I want to kill white people, especially white officers"), although mentioned in the introduction, are not in the categorized list. But I guess it's just "isolated incidents", they needed the space for a couple of anti-abortion attempted murders.

What do you mean, rare? The boogeyman of the left, white nationalism is at 11, if wiki is the scale we're using.

I mean that Wiki is listing 15 attacks in 20 years, with the clear outlier being 9/11. I didn't say anything about how rare or common white nationalist attacks were.

You said "Muslims planning or engaging in religious-based violence in America are rare, perhaps exceptionally so." That 'exceptionnally rare' is 100% false.

But okay. You mean then, that terrorism is rare in general. That may be true, but so are wars. And one can cause the other, as 9/11 or sarajevo '14 have shown.

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The civil rights movement immediately led to a continual orgy of violence and mayhem (the OG summers of Floyd), and that the American public begged someone to put an end to it. This was Nixon's silent majority.

Immediately? Is that immediately after the Montgomery Bus Boycott got started at the end of 1955? Or immediately after the Little Rock desegregation protests in 1957? Immediately after the sit-ins that lasted, in various places, from 1958 to 1962? Immediately after the 1961 Freedom Rides? The Ole Miss riot? The Birmingham campaign? King's march on Washington? Freedom Summer 1964? The passage of the Civil Rights Act? Passage of the Voting Rights Act? Up until 1964 most of the notable riots of the Civil Rights Movement were instigated by whites. Even when the first significant urban disturbances happened in 1964 they didn't result in conservatives ascending to the presidency. By the time of the first serious rioting in 1967 and 1968 the first wave of the Civil Rights Movement i.e. what everyone thinks of when they think of the Civil Rights Movement was pretty much over. Dr. King wasn't even alive during the Long Hot Summer of 1968. Your concept of immediacy is sorely lacking, or at least at odds with any reasonable definition of the term.

Note critically, that restrictive covenants were private agreements between private homeowners; and thereby entirely outside the scope of any plausible interpretation of the constitution.

Well, no, that wasn't the ruling. The ruling was that the court couldn't enforce the contract because doing so would constitute state action under the 14th Amendment. The idea of contracts being technically valid but ultimately unenforceable isn't exactly novel in law; for example, a court wouldn't enforce a contract between two minors.

Here again, the US government joined the black plaintiff in requesting that the Court establish the precedent that promoting based on intelligence tests would be like providing equality of opportunity "merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox." In other words, presumptively discriminatory unless you could prove otherwise.

The point of Griggs wasn't so much IQ testing as it was that you can't enforce arbitrary standards in a transparent attempt to technically comply with the law while not actually complying with it. No one seriously thought that a Southern company that had simply barred blacks from certain positions outright just a few years prior and decided to admit them only if they passed education or testing requirements that had no bearing on the actual job but happened to disproportionately disadvantage blacks was making a good faith attempt to comply with the civil rights act. It's as if a black-owned company decided to screen employees based on knowledge of BET programming and rappers you've never heard of (and no, you can't study for it, because the kind of rap black people in the projects listen to isn't the same kind of rap that gets talked about much in mainstream publications).

The 1964 civil rights act, or something else in the early 60s was the tipping point.

Here's murder:

https://cdn.mises.org/homicide.png

Here's violent crime generally:

https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/violent-crime-rate.jpg

And the Ghetto riots start in 1964.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_riots_(1964%E2%80%931969)

By 1969 there's also a doubling in the burglary rate which climbs continually since 1960. I can't quickly find a comparison point to the 1950s.

https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

The first wave of the Baby Boom turned 18 in 1964.

In 1948, The US government joined a black plaintiff and their black lawyers in suing

Nope. Although once the cases reached the Supreme Court, the US govt filed an amicus brief, as is often the case, the lawsuits (there were two companion cases) were each filed by neighbors seeking to prevent the sale of a home to a black guy: "On October 9, 1945, respondents, as owners of other property subject to the terms of the restrictive covenant, brought suit in the Circuit Court of the city of St. Louis praying that petitioners Shelley be restrained from taking possession of the property" 341 US 1, 6. "The second of the cases under consideration comes to this Court from the Supreme Court of Michigan. The circumstances presented do not differ materially from the Missouri case. . . . By deed dated November 30, 1944. petitioners, who were found by the trial court to be Negroes, acquired title to the property and thereupon entered into its occupancy. On January 30, 1945, respondents, as owners of property subject to the terms of the restrictive agreement, brought suit against petitioners in the Circuit Court of Wayne County. After a hearing, the court entered a decree directing petitioners to move from the property within ninety days." 341 US 1, 7.

Of course, by US government I mean; Jewish solicitor general Philip Elman, four Jewish lawyers and not a single gentile lawyer.

Perlman, not Elman. And, according to the Supreme Court opinion, "With him on the brief was Attorney General Clark," - that would be Tom Clark, who does not appear to be Jewish.

Note critically, that restrictive covenants were private agreements between private homeowners

Do you know what else was a private agreement? The agreement between the seller, a white guy, and the buyer, a black guy.

Critically however, Jewish lawyers never appear on the anti-civil rights side of a case.

You mention Griggs later. In that case, "Lawrence M. Cohen argued the cause for the Chamber of Commerce of the United States as amicus curiae urging affirmance [i.e., in favor of Duke Power]".

Then there is the Bakke case, in which "Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance [i.e., in favor of Bakke] were filed by . . . Abraham S. Goldstein, Nathan Z. Dershowitz, Arthur J. Gajarsa, Thaddeus L. Kowalski, Anthony J. Fornelli, Howard L. Greenberger, Samuel Rabinove, Themis N. Anastos, Julian E. Kulas, and Alan M. Dershowitz for the American Jewish Committee et al.; . . . by Philip B. Kurland, Daniel D. Polsby, Larry M. Lavinsky, Arnold Forster, Dennis Rapps, Anthony J. Fornelli, Leonard Greenwald, and David I. Ashe for the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith et al.; . . . [and] by Benjamin Vinar and David I. Caplan for the Queens Jewish Community Council et al."

The murder of IQ testing (Grigg's v. Duke Power Company)** ... Here again, the US government joined the black plaintiff in requesting that the Court establish the precedent that promoting based on intelligence tests would be like providing equality of opportunity "merely in the sense of the fabled offer of milk to the stork and the fox." In other words, presumptively discriminatory unless you could prove otherwise.

Nope. Rather the Court simply held that "Nothing in the Act precludes the use of testing or measuring procedures; obviously they are useful. What Congress has forbidden is giving these devices and mechanisms controlling force unless they are demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance." 401 US 424, 436. And note that that is an interpretation of an act of Congress; if Congress did not like that interpretation, it was free to change the law.

Note also that, until the day that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect, "the Company openly discriminated on the basis of race in the hiring and assigning of employees at its Dan River plant. The plant was organized into five operating departments: (1) Labor, (2) Coal Handling, (3) Operations, (4) Maintenance, and (5) Laboratory and Test. Negroes were employed only in the Labor Department where the highest paying jobs paid less than the lowest paying jobs in the other four "operating" departments in which only whites were employed.' Then, on the very day that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect, the company added the IQ test requirement. 401 US 424, 427-428. The Supreme Court is not composed of morons.

Ok, I got the Cohen part wrong and this counts as a big dent on my credibility, and my argument. Sincere thanks! It's pretty blatant too, so I don't exactly have much to say for myself. I'll edit the post to include a partial retraction.

For interested readers: https://www.supremecourt.gov/pdfs/transcripts/1970/70-124_12-14-1970.pdf

I'll also check out the Bakke case, and post on it shortly.

Thanks. And please do take a hammer to any of my posts at any time.

I recommend David Mamet’s book “The Secret Knowledge” on how he extracted himself from progressivism (before it got super-weird, to his credit), and why he identifies socialist collectivism with the form of social justice preached in liberal synagogues (those which don’t believe the Torah is reliably historical beyond one of the captivities). It’s only one chapter, but it’s burned into my mind like Goldstein’s book excerpt in 1984.

I recommend it in general, in addition to recommending it to understand the Jewish socialism angle; Mamet’s “The Edge” starring Hopkins and Baldwin is one of the most perfect films of all time, and he carries over the wit and wordiness which made his name in the first place. He’s the non-liberal Aaron Sorkin.

You think this is going make a dent in his antisemitism?

Nah. Once someone’s taken that pill, they’ll not vomit it up without divine intervention.

Interesting. I had no idea David Mamet was behind that movie The Edge. Interesting. That movie is kind of a "Hatchet" (remember that book?) for adults.

He has a background as a playwright which makes the outdoorsiness of that film an unusual fit for his repertoire, I would think.

The Supreme Court sided with the US Government, and the only mechanism protecting tens of millions of Americans, including 80% of homes in Los Angeles and Chicago; from the carnage that was to follow, was rendered unenforceable. This was single most important battleground of the civil rights movement, and it was won by the enemy before people knew the war was going on.

If housing covenants were the only thing protecting urban Americans from living in "open air sewers," then I daresay your war was lost in 1619, not in 1948.

Your overall thesis appears to be that all groups of high-IQ nonwhites are moral mutants with incompatible values with whom whites ought to interact as though they are dealing with some technologically advanced alien species rather than their fellow human beings. I can only assume that you're planning a post about Indian Brahmins somewhere down the line. Even assuming this were true, at current rates of intermarriage there won't be very many non-mixed Jews left in the US outside of the Hasidic community within a few generations. Their group identity will persist longer than that of other European immigrants, but the sort of secular Jews who were the driving force behind much of American leftism in the mid-20th century are a dying breed and will soon join the likes of the Tammany Hall Irish and what's left of the Italian-American Mafia in the dustbin of history.

Actually I think the Jewish problem is mainly socially constructed, and that the only genetic aspect to it is their high IQ. Imagine if you will, the Irish suddenly becoming 15 points smarter and a million of them migrating into the UK while obtaining a corresponding share of the Irish elite. You think the part where the key factor in Irish identity is their oppression, mostly real but sometimes fictional by brits is somehow gonna be forgotten? You think they might not sympathise and ally with every other resentful anti-British group ion the planet? Then what should Brits do?

If oppression of minority or colonized groups is the cause of their resentment, then presumably we should try not to oppress them more and to enforce as much of a 90's-style colorblind attitude as possible. We might also surreptitiously reduce coverage of past oppression in history classes, preach some form of civic nationalism and common identity, and encourage intermarriage and assimilation to ensure that old prejudices do not endure.

Manipulate housing prices in order to extract rents from all the anti-British immigrants and have the last laugh while they squabble over pronouns and shit?

Like your prior posts about Chinese people, this amounts to you presenting a few anecdotes to make an argument so weak that it borders on incoherence. You seem to to saying a few cases where Jews were lawyers in supposedly important cases is proof of some sort of phenomenon, but what even is that phenomenon? Whatever it is, how could this incredibly meager evidence prove it, and shouldn't there be much better evidence available which would result in a more useful discussion?

Is the phenomenon that you are trying to prove that American Jewish people are more left-wing than the general public even when you control for "elite" status? Or more specifically, that they are more aligned with the sort of racial politics popular among the left in the U.S., perhaps because they were allied when discrimination against Jewish people was widespread and it became culturally self-perpetuating? Then why try to prove this with some random anecdotes about Jewish lawyers and support for Nixon rather than much stronger and more direct evidence like public opinion polls asking about those issues? And why treat "Jewish people are more left-wing" as some novel phenomenon you have to guess at from scratch, rather than demographic differences in politics being a well-known phenomenon that pollsters gather data on all the time? (Incidentally, left-wing "privilege" discourse and the assumption that differences in outcome reflect discrimination carries some unintended implications about Jewish success and arguably has similarities with some of the resentment that fueled historical anti-Jewish discrimination, not to mention specifics like Harvard admissions policies. A survey asking equality vs. equity questions might get some interesting results by seeing how much difference it makes to apply the same logic to Jewish people as part of the survey.)

Alternatively, is the proposed phenomenon something more specific or controversial than Jewish people having different political demographics for whatever reason? Are we talking about genetic differences, and if so what kind? E.g. if you propose Jewish people are genetically higher in Openness to Experience which got them allied with the left historically, wouldn't you again be better off with surveys rather than legal anecdotes? Are we talking about Jewish people (or some elite subset of them) getting secret nightly marching orders from the Elders of Zion, and if so shouldn't leaking or intercepting those orders be much better evidence? Are you even consciously thinking about the specifics of the phenomenon you are proposing, or are you just grouping together Jewish people as a unit and treating them as you would an individual? "I don't like George because look at these 3 cases of him doing something I dislike." might be a compelling argument about an individual, but when talking about groups of millions of people much better evidence is available and is required to determine anything meaningful.

Is the phenomenon that you are trying to prove that American Jewish people are more left-wing than the general public even when you control for "elite" status?

Yes. And that this difference is enough to fundamentally alter the direction of a nation, towards what I consider terrible outcomes. There is one qualifier, which I'll get to later if I continue this series, and it's that labels can mean fundamentally different things under different people. Early Progressives may have shared the statism of modern progressives, but their vision of progress included 'sterilize the incompetent to improve our gene pool', 'let's resegregate the government' and 'we must preserve the white race' and 'self-determination but only for functional peoples, others need colonialism'.

If your analysis of Stalin and Beria vs. Gorbachev and Chernenko, misses the part where Stalin and Beria were Georgians ruling over Russians and Gorbachev and Chernenko were Russians ruling over mainly Russians, and confines itself to formal ideological labels, it's arguably worse than useless. Groups that understand the tenuous nature of their power are gonna pursue their goals with far greater brutality and indifference to suffering.

So are these secular jews or religious jews?

This one should be relatively easy to solve. What percentage of the institutionalized was black?

Might there be some lingering selection bias in the new world cohort?

What do you think was selected for or against?

Expendability / Saleability

Angered the chief / king.

Lost the conflict with your neighbors, etc.

Why do black people of identical West African bantu descent have such different crime rates in different countries?

They don't. Unless you're talking highly selected tiny populations of foreign strivers in certain countries.

For example, Britain, home to a modest but non-negligible amount of West Indian immigrants:

Among adults, Black men were about 8.4 times more likely to be arrested for robbery compared with White men

They're playing coy over at that link, however:

In relation to knife crime, a 2018 report entitled ‘Justice Matters: Disproportionality’[footnote 11] references data collected by the Metropolitan Police Service. This work showed that in London in 2017, 50% of knife crime offenders were BAME (up from 44% in 2008). In this total, 50% were under the age of 25 and the majority (90%) were male. 50% of knife crime victims were BAME. A similar pattern emerged when examining knife crime with injury.

BAME stands for "black and middle eastern", however, middle eastern is just 15-20% of the BAME grouping, which based on that demographic data makes up 10% of London inhabitants.

I'm fairly sure the homicide numbers would be similar, as I remember looking them up and finding out they were almost identical to the American ones. It's worth noting that the document link says something about how pure conviction data are misleading, and it was clearly too much work to adjust them for demographics.

This was sarcasm, I'm sure the report writers, no doubt a committee, chose to omit the most damning statistics, and just left us with traces, such as the robbery and knife crime, as to avoid getting in trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London

A) The rule that homicides are a good metric for general crime because they are unlikely to be swept under the rug may only apply to Western countries. How many intrepid journalists are looking to expose underreporting in third world countries, and would anyone care?

B) Nonetheless, levels are probably substantially lower as blacks aren't necessarily gonna be soft on black criminals in a black majority country. There may be collective punishment mechanisms in play.

Why do some large countries in the region where most African Americans originate (eg. Ghana) have markedly lower homicide rates than African Americans?

Firstly, you need to ask yourself how reliable these statistics are. Police are seen in Ghana as the 'most corrupt institution' people encounter. Were they to have incentives to hide crime, you shouldn' really trust it.

Secondly, it could very well be that in Ghana, they retain harsh practices that do not lead to the promotion of crime, such as treating boys leniently, etc.

Also, as to their 'lack' of crime : they don't see it that way. They're apparently still lynching people, and with even less premeditation than Americans used to. As in, they don't abduct the suspect from police custody, but rather kill a suspect on the spot.

than Scots Irish

Are they the same people ? The border region populations was seen as dregs of three nations. As I understand, the peasants who used to live there, with a violent culture, not very good at farming either were largely driven out by their former lords once peace prevailed.

If the American slave population was adversely selected in the first place -- African tribes selling their own convicts, misfits and conquered people to Western slavers -- then HBD provides an explanation why the group descended from them continues to underperform.

If that's the case (and I haven't seen any evidence that African tribes were predisposed to selling convicts and misfits to slavers; I don't see what conquered people has to do with anything given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor), then we should expect other places with similar concentrations of undesirables to be similar. I'm unaware of any evidence that suggests that the crime rate in Australia is higher than that in England, and the former was specifically founded as a penal colony.

I don't see what conquered people has to do with anything given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor

It suggests, on average, that the conquered people are less fit than the conquerors.

given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor

Both World Wars are by mainstream historians thought to have been started by the side which would go on to lose. With starting a war commonly considered a sign of bellicosity and proneness to violence, one has some pretty big anecdotal evidence against the quoted line.

More comments

HBD posits a partial reversion to the mean one generation after the selection event occurs. After that, there should be no further effect; the non-heritable components of the initial selection (including both shared and non-shared environmental components and test error from the selection event) will have washed out with the next generation, while the heritable component will remain forever.

Reversion to the mean is a thing regardless of HBD. What it says is that if you select on a characteristic that is partly heritable, the next generation of the selected population will be closer to the mean of the parent population than the selected population itself is. But it happens only once and it doesn't bring you all the way back.

BAME stands for "black and middle eastern"

It actually stands for "Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic" - i.e. it is the British equivalent of POC, a term for lumping all non-white groups together. As of 2021, the British government discourages its use because the various non-white ethnic groups do not in fact like being lumped together.

Anecdotally, Jamaicans and Somalis are the black subgroups that commit most of the crime. I always think the best argument against HBD as the main explanation for crime rates is the difference between Jamaica (45 murders per 100,000) and Barbados (14), which carries over to Jamaicans and Bajans in the UK.

which carries over to Jamaicans and Bajans in the UK.

14 is still very high. Most white populations, in conditions of normality have someting like 2-4.

Also, just how 'black' are 'Bajans' ?

Because, for example, wikipedia has 'Rihanna' as an example of a afro-Barbadian. yet she's not that black.

If you look at e.g. pictures of Haitians, they're far darker. (picture linked). So what's the breakdown of ancestry of the population of Barbados?

With IQ, there is a clear pattern of lower function the more black ancestry is present. It's probably similar if you're dealing with crime.

Per the national censuses, which use local race groupings that don't include a US-style one-drop rule, both Jamaica and Barbados are 92% black, with most of the rest being mixed. This is the typical pattern for the Caribbean (including Haiti), with a majority black population who look something like Usain Bolt, with a small mixed-race elite who look like Rhianna. Looking at the pictures in the Barbados and Bridgetown wikipedia articles confirmed this.

The Caribbean-American community is mostly drawn from this mixed-race elite (because US immigration is selective) - think Eric Holder or Colin Powell. But the Bajans who stayed in Barbados or who moved to the UK before or shortly after independence (when UK immigration for Commonwealth citizens was not selective) are blacker.

Scott has a post arguing against this connection.

Reverse Voxsplaining: Prison and Mental Illness

What about that graph? It’s very suggestive. You see a sudden drop in the number of people in state mental hospitals. Then you see a corresponding sudden rise in the number of people in prison. It looks like there’s some sort of Law Of Conservation Of Institutionalization. Coincidence?

Yes. Absolutely. It is 100% a coincidence. Studies show that the majority of people let out of institutions during the deinstitutionalization process were not violent and that the rate of violent crime committed by the mentally ill did not change with deinstitutionalization. Even if we take the “15% of inmates are severely mentally ill” factoid at face value, that would mean that the severely mentally ill could explain at most 15%-ish of the big jump in prison population in the 1980s.

To render the argument statistically plausible it seems like you would need to both justify why the proportion of murderers who are mentally ill seems to have declined (the linked study is from Britain so you could try to see if it's different in the U.S.?) and why most of those in prison do not seem to be mentally ill according to screening surveys. Note that, though it isn't a significant part of his argument, Scott does cite the famous Rosenhan experiment which was very likely a fraud.

Associating it with "violent homeless people" specifically is more plausible. Saying it had an "extraordinary effect on crime rates" doesn't seem plausible, and that is what I was mentioning Scott's post in response to. The majority of violent crime is from career criminals. It seems very difficult to argue that deinstitutionalization was responsible for the rise in the crime rate without evidence indicating most of those additional criminals are mentally ill (and seriously enough that they would have been institutionalized).

The problem of violent crime is quite far from 1:1 of "violent" mentally ill homeless. I don't think gangbangers in the US or Sicarios in Mexico are exactly suffering from the same ailments that the homeless guy who pisses on passengers on the train is from.

Yeah they shittify places sometimes literally but if violence is exactly what you are after, the mentally ill might not be the best target.

I would be inclined to agree with the sibling comment - gangbangers, Sicarios, etc do commit lots of violence, but almost entirely towards rival gangs or drug dealers. It seems pretty rare for them to hassle ordinary people. Many such organizations have existed for long periods of time in local communities and rarely get significant pushback from those communities. Many of them even take the law into their own hands to an extent, dealing out street justice to petty thieves and nutcases when the police are slow to act.

There's a standard argument about gun control in the US that you hear a lot in the liberal bubble. Obviously, this argument does not appear to be very compelling to the anti-gun control side. It's pretty hard to find the counterarguments while embedded in the bubble, so I'm asking here in the hopes someone might explain them.

The argument comes from making a comparison between cars and guns. Both create about the same magnitude of danger when in the wrong hands, but cars are significantly more important for being able to function in modern society. Therefore guns ownership and usage should be regulated at least as strongly as cars are. In particular, car ownership has a strict licensing requirement including a safety/competency test and also requires insurance in case of accidents. We should therefore pass additional gun regulations requiring the same.

I can imagine the counterargument being in almost any step of this chain of logic:

  • For some reason, cars are actually far more dangerous than guns in the wrong hands, maybe when you appropriately consider the kind of car or kind of gun people most commonly have.

  • Maybe it seems that cars are more important for modern living, but actually guns are more important, maybe as protection against low-probability really horrible things---tyrannical government, breakdown of society, etc. I guess this would require making some kind of expected value justification, that the horrible thing is likely enough and guns ownership would actually help enough.

  • I can't really see anyone disagreeing with cars being regulated to the level the argument claims.

  • We don't need to pass additional gun regulations like those for cars. Because of so and so reason, guns are actually already regulated more strictly than cars. Just look based on this and this example how much easier it is to get a car than a gun (though as long as it's not actually super misleading, the stereotypical Texas Walmart example makes this hard for me to see).

Which of these points can actually be expanded into counterarguments you guys find compelling? How do you do so? Is there something else I'm not considering?

There's no constitutional amendment declaring your right to drive a car. Had cars existed at the time there might be, but there's not, so it's not much of a comparison.

Yes, this is the argument that's most convincing to me, too: "Cars aren't in the Constitution".

Call me an autistic legal formalist if you want, but if you don't give overwhelming weight to "It's literally in the Bill of Rights" then why are you even an American?

Others, much more qualified than I, are taking on the mistake about assuming guns are as regulated as cars. I'll take the other horn, private citizens being armed plays a vital role in ensuring that democracy stays democratic. How do you actually compare the value of transit to a ward against tyranny? Life in places without fire arms seems to get more and more restrictive over time and history is replete with examples of unarmed minorities being abused. Modern gun controlled societies are so new that we really can't say that they don't inevitably fall to tyranny.

"Sword hunts" in Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration are the best example I can think of of premodern arms control, and Japan prior to that was definitely not a free and open society. Interestingly the US also confiscated swords from the Japanese populace after WW2, another indication that it was an attempt to solidify control/prevent rebellion, though I know that the US was also trying to stamp out certain parts of Japanese culture completely (see film censorship as an example of this).

Well, the #1 argument is it is just plain false that it is easier to get a gun than a car. For most people, purchasing a gun under age 18 is banned. In most states, getting a license at age 18 requires no test, only for the earlier age 16 license is a road test required.

Second, states are perfectly allowed to regulate the ways people possess guns while in public spaces through open and concealed carry regimes. Many have much harsher requirements than the harshest imposed on 16 year olds for drivers licenses. I don't recall any successful constitutional challenges to reasonable concealed carry regimes, such as requiring training courses or repealing them for bad behavior.

Third, doing bad with guns is obviously much more highly punished than doing so with automobiles. You typically get 3 strikes on your drivers license. Try discharging your pistol into the ceiling of a Wal Mart and see how many strikes you get.

In most states, getting a license at age 18 requires no test, only for the earlier age 16 license is a road test required.

Is this true? In Massachusetts, you need a road test no matter what age you are, but if you're 16-17, you also need to have taken driving classes before taking and passing the road test. In either case, you need to have a permit first, which requires passing a written test. I was under the impression that this was pretty standard in the US. In which states can an 18 year old just walk into the RMV and get a driving license after at most a written test?

That struck me as odd, I can't find a hard state-by-state comparison but I found a recent Jalopnik article describing the easiest states to get your license and Texas was the only one that didn't have a driving exam, and that was contingent on the applicant having completed drivers ed.

It looks like there were some states that allowed a waiver of road tests during COVID, but yeah, every state requires a road test.

In Illinois that was true up until a few years ago when they tightened the laws a bit. Our surrounding states do not have such requirements AFAIK. Indiana, for example, considers all of its "under 21" licensees probationary, but you only need a driving course if you are trying to get it at 16 as opposed to 17.

There's a standard argument about gun control in the US that you hear a lot in the liberal bubble. Obviously, this argument does not appear to be very compelling to the anti-gun control side.

Arguments from people from "liberal bubble" are not compelling to the "gun nuts" at all.

Why? Because people from these bubble are completely, willfully and proudly ignorant. Not only about guns, not only about reality of gun violence, but also about all gun laws and regulations that are already in the books.

Typical exchange looks like this:

"Fuck AmeriKKKa! Only in this country can every child walk to gun shop, buy machine gun and bring it to school!"

"attempt to explain that this is not how it works"

"Shut up, gun nut! You have small dick!"

What could dispel this pigheaded attitude? Only personal experience. This happens - when person from "the bubble" feels directly, personally endangered, finds that police are there not to serve and protect, but to bully and brutalize, and decides as last and desperate resort to buy a gun.

Many such cases - ask any gun shop employee.

These "bubble people" are among the least welcomed patrons (after stoned/drunk/crazy people and tattoed thugs in gang colors). They would tell you tales how they had to explain these customers there are such thing as gun laws, that they cannot just pick a gun and take it home right now (and face screaming and hysterical meltdowns).

The argument comes from making a comparison between cars and guns.

This is old argument that is based on exactly this kind of ignorance.

Actually regulating guns like cars would be something that most gun owners would be extremely happy with.

https://reason.com/1999/11/01/taking-it-to-the-streets-2/

Although anti-gun lobbyists who use the car analogy are pushing for additional controls, laws that really did treat guns like cars would be much less restrictive, on the whole, than what we have now.

...

The first thing to go would be the 1986 federal ban on the manufacture of machine guns for sale to ordinary citizens. We don't ban cars like Porsches just because they are high-powered and can drive much faster than the speed limit.

...

So-called assault weapons are actually ordinary guns that fire just one bullet each time the trigger is pressed, but they happen to look like machine guns. Just as we don't ban powerful Porsches (which actually can go very fast), we don't ban less-powerful vehicles that simply look like high-performance cars.

...

Also slated for elimination under the treat-cars-like-guns rule are thousands of laws regulating the purchase of firearms and their possession on private property. The simple purchase of an automobile is subject to essentially no restrictions.

...

If you keep your automobile on private property, there are virtually no restrictions.

...

Thus, we can get rid of all the laws concerning gun storage in the home, together with the laws that ban possession of guns by various persons on private property.

...

If you have a car on your own property, you can hitch it to a trailer, have it pulled to someone else's property, and drive the car on his property (assuming you have his permission). As long as your car is just being towed, you don't need a driver's license or plates. Thus, gun owners should be allowed to transport their unloaded guns to private property (a shooting gallery, for example) for use on that property.

...

But now suppose that you want to use your car on public property, such as a street or an old logging trail in a national forest. Then a licensing system does come into play–but only because the car will be used in public. For a license that allows you to drive a car anywhere in public, most states require that you 1) be at least 15 or 16 years old; 2) take a written safety test that requires an IQ of no more than 75 to pass; and 3) show an examiner that you know how to operate a car and how to obey basic safety rules and traffic signs.

...

Making the concealed handgun licensing system exactly like the driver licensing system would involve a few tweaks, namely: 1) reducing the minimum age for a license (21 or 25 in most states); 2) reducing the fees (which can run over $100 in many states); 3) mandating a written exam in the minority of states that do not currently have one; 4) adding a practical demonstration test, which most states do not currently have (but which Texas does); and 5) making the licenses valid everywhere, instead of just in the issuing state.

...

Once you get a driver's license, you can drive your car anywhere that is open to the public. Thus, we will have to repeal all the laws against carrying guns within 1,000 feet of a school, or in bars, or on government property.

...

So the one major way in which treating guns like cars would lead to more-restrictive gun laws would be to allow federal regulators to impose design mandates on firearms.

Even better than how I said it.

low-probability really horrible things---tyrannical government

Yes, this is the standard conservative argument -- private ownership of guns is a check against government tyranny, and this is the original reasoning behind the second amendment. But conservatives would take issue with characterizing this as "low-probability". A common thread through modern history is governments turning against their citizens, and a goodly fraction of the world is currently suffering under totalitarian dictatorships.

The government is the last entity you'd want enforcing gun control or deciding who can legally carry. And no other entity has the power.

Both create about the same magnitude of danger when in the wrong hands, but cars are significantly more important for being able to function in modern society.

This is only true when societies are generally safe and orderly, and organized state-provided force (i.e. police or similar) are available to rapidly respond to and alleviate any exceptions to that rule (crimes, wildlife attacks, invasions, etc.)

Being unarmed in a lawless, unpoliced society is much more dangerous than being without a car. It places you at the mercy of just about any predator or thug who cares to exercise power over you, which is something that cannot be meaningfully predicted or otherwise deterred without someone being armed.

Thanks to everyone for the replies! I'm seeing three main thrusts in counterarguments:

  • The risks that guns and cars produce are very different from each other so even making the comparison in the first place is a little silly (see here and here for example).

  • Guns are actually regulated much more strictly than the people who usually make this argument are aware---even to the point where the argument comes off as frustratingly ignorant (see here)

  • Yes, there are actually compelling reasons that widespread gun ownership significantly reduces the risk of the government becoming tyrannical (see here and here)

I hope I haven't misrepresented anything here.

The primary danger from cars and from guns are very different. They are involved in a ballpark similar number of total deaths, but gun-related deaths are around 2/3 suicides, 1/3 homicides, negligible unintentional, while the vast majority of auto fatalities are unintentional. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare them directly--how do you know if regulations on cars are "stricter" than those on guns? They're aimed at different things (or at least, they should be--restrictions targeted at homicide probably far outweigh those targeted at suicide). For example, there's a laundry list of individuals who can't legally buy firearms, including anyone ever convicted of a felony or a domestic violence crime, anyone under a restraining order, and others (full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Instant_Criminal_Background_Check_System#Prohibited_persons). As far as I know, the only similar restriction for driving is if you drive drunk--and I believe this is conditional/state dependent, rather than being a universal and federal law. The former is also probably somewhat easier to enforce. Driver's licenses are fully reciprocal within US states and even from many foreign countries, but attempting to travel with a firearm across state lines, let alone international ones, is potentially nightmarish. Transferring a firearm or any of a long list of accessories to another person can require a months-long wait and expensive fee, etc.

Of course, cars also have their own restrictions. Every state requires passing written and road tests for a DL; the requirement to buy a gun is usually pretty light aside from age and the specific restrictions mentioned above. Even the requirements to carry concealed, which are more stringent, are only more difficult than a DL in a few states, and even that may change if Bruen is actually enforced. I suspect most gun-control advocates don't actually know almost any of the regulations on guns, gun ownership, and carrying.

And these differences aren't necessarily inconsistent: Using a car safely is far more difficult than using a gun safely. There are more rules, the machine is vastly more complicated, it usually is used in a much less controlled environment, it takes a lot of practice and constant awareness, etc.

This is just ignorance from morons who don't know anything about what it takes to purchase or own a firearm and the vast library of pernicious and malicious laws that one must navigate.

I work in a gun shop, and the "I watch CNN, I know you just sell guns, I'm not filling out paperwork" guy is a perennial favorite. My job is mostly paperwork compliance. Of the ten or so employees, four are dedicated to paperwork, compliance, legal shit.

In my city, state, and counting federal statutes, there's around 75,000 separate laws governing firearms. Anyone who wants another one should explain very carefully how what they propose is going to affect crime, not just all gun owners, and this proposal does a total of jack and shit for crime.

Is there something else I'm not considering?

Our regulation of modern means of travel is itself on very, very shaky constitutional ground, and only the fact that the majority of people impacted by these laws tend to be from disadvantaged and disorganized sections of the population has prevented the formation of any kind of interest group to oppose it. The government already has all the tools in place to thoroughly restrict the movement of individuals it deems unworthy, and that it has not done so in a way that harms most Americans is contingent rather than principled.

Freedom of travel within states is generally a protected right in all state constitutions outside of private property laws. The right to travel in between states is protected specifically in the federal constitution. But that right has been thoroughly eroded by restricting it to, essentially, walking; and then restricting walking on major limited access highways even if you were crazy enough to try. One can be placed on the no fly list with no notice and only a convoluted bureaucratic method to appeal one's placement. Mask and vaccine mandates were used to restrict use of public transit. Driver's licenses can be revoked for crimes, and insurance requirements mean that as we inevitably get our social credit system in place it will be impossible to own a car if one has committed too much wrongthink. After all, do you really want to be known as the insurance company that does business with Spencer or Bannon?

I'm not saying that car or other travel regulations are on a purely utilitarian basis wrongheaded, I'm saying that they are dangerously tyrannical in the same way that gun control is, and we need to think hard about the parallels both in the direction of protecting 2a rights, and in the direction of abolishing or due-process-ing the No Fly List.

I think the biggest problem with that argument is that cars pretty much entirely kill unintentionally. Only about 535 accidental gun deaths occurred in 2020, according to the CDC. That's 2.2% of all gun deaths in the US that year. That's an order of magnitude less than annual accidental drowning deaths, and fewer deaths than (scarcely regulated) swimming pools or bath tubs alone.

It's not enough to say "here's a problem, here's a regulation that pertains in a very broad sense to that problem, therefore the regulation will help address the problem". If people want to commit murder or suicide with a gun, it's incumbent upon would-be regulators to explain how their proposed regulations would stop those people. "We'll make it illegal" does no good - murder is already illegal, and suicidal people won't care. "We'll require a license" does no good when people can trivially obtain one like they can a driver's license. And if the licensing requirement becomes sufficiently onerous that it's practically a ban, they'll run into the same problem as advocates of banning guns: how exactly is that going to happen in a country with a 2nd Amendment, more guns than people, and criminals who don't care what you say you've banned?

Regulators should have good laws that work and not have bad laws that don't work, and if that's not happening there should be pushback. But gun regulation isn't the impossible task you make it out to be. The whole "murder is illegal anyway" doesn't track because gun laws can make things more risky by increasing the points of illegality before the murder actually happens. Then you start cracking down on minor crimes, search for guns while you do it, and bam you have a much nicer city Mr. Giuliani. Similarly I easily can imagine effectiveness in inconveniencing and tagging people at high suicide risk (ie people who have attempted before) just because I think many of those happen at intense points, under the influence, etc.

Another thing but the with the whole onerous gun laws thing: Those should just be relaxed if you're a woman, and that'll solve most of those issues. If you're a man, then you should keep a clean slate or get one illegally if you really need to protect yourself and you don't pass the background check, you should probably have connections at that point anyway.

Yeah, I'm not suggesting that nothing can be done to increase enforcement of existing laws. Like you said, the Giuliani/Bratton era in New York City is a good example of that. Nor am I saying that possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony shouldn't be an enhancement to sentencing. I'm just saying that there's not much else in the way of plausible laws or regulations (the OP's topic) that is going to meaningfully reduce gun deaths in a country with 400 million guns and a 2nd Amendment.

I think the biggest problem with that argument is that cars pretty much entirely kill unintentionally.

While I'm not completely onboard with anti-car YIMBY urbanists, I think they have a reasonable point that most automobile "accidents" are the result of avoidable negligence, and that our auto safety standards reflect a growing allowance for carelessness on the part of drivers. IMO limiting road-legal cars to 90mph (5 over the highest legal speed limit in the country) with strict liability and enforcement, and limiting power to fairly modest acceleration would anger a lot of gearheads but probably save lives overall. Europe does reasonably well with average velocity enforcement of time between fixed measurement points.

I'm not opposed to people owning performance cars, but I don't think they should be "performing" on public streets. There's probably some reasonable middle ground with separate "road" and "race" modes in car computers that I'd be willing to go along with.

I love cars, but I'm pro tiered licensing at this point. Basic license as currently constructed should cover cars up to 180-230 horsepower, anything higher than that should require actual driving training, including track work on vehicle dynamics, and towing/large vehicle handling. I'm tired of people buying gigantic trucks/SUVs that they can't drive or park. Hazard to themselves and others.

Tons of great cars have less than 230 horsepower. You can get a Transit Van that will hit highway speeds with cargo or passengers, you can get a Toyota GR86 and have a ton of fun. But you can't get a car that is both big and fast; driving a Suburban or an F150 with a 220 horsepower engine isn't that enjoyable.

Fine, you want a Hellcat or a Raptor? If you've got $50k+ to spend on a car, pony up $10k and a couple weekends to take classes at the track.

Such restrictions could be imposed through private insurance rather than through government licensing. In some states, private insurance companies already are forced by the govt. to reduce your insurance costs if you take certain safety courses. (See, e. g., New Jersey Statutes § 17:33B-45.1.) Just have the govt. suggest (not mandate) that insurance companies impose actuarially-justified fees on people who drive bigger or more-powerful vehicles without taking corresponding training. (And if in reality no fees are actuarially justified, then none will be imposed.)

Actuarial calculations do not consider eg parking and non accident hazards.

Just have the govt. suggest (not mandate) that insurance companies impose actuarially-justified fees on people who drive bigger or more-powerful vehicles without taking corresponding training.

This is just doing it via direct government requirements, only dishonestly.

(And if in reality no fees are actuarially justified, then none will be imposed.)

If the government "suggests" them they will be justified by the risk of government action if the suggestion is ignored.

and that our auto safety standards reflect a growing allowance for carelessness on the part of drivers

The problem is, at this point, mostly unsolvable in the "it's trivial for a state to co-ordinate this, but it makes life a lot worse if they do" sense.

Sure, you can legislate away the dashboard screens (and every control moved there is a strict malus to safety, but the manufacturers like them because it's cheap for them to install, expensive for you to replace, and bakes in obsolescence thanks to how tech companies work). But if you do that, drivers just fall back on their phones like they were before they bought a car with the screens and that's even worse.

And all the other solutions don't work. You could make phones read GPS constantly and just refuse to work above a certain speed, but that means you can't use your phone on the bus, train, or as a passenger and it also kills the battery. Explicit go/no-go zones don't work because they still don't help passengers and are abusable by governments.

I think the best solution at this point is an extension of industry trend: mandate (directly or indirectly) that new phones must function as physical keys for cars. You surrender your phone to the ignition switch (which captures it until you turn the car off), which has a bit of extra hardware that still functions in this way if its battery has died. There are a bunch of complications that you could use to get around this (mostly to do with the requirement for an extra physical key) but it mostly boils down to the car being completely dependent on the phone being in the ignition to play music, display a map, and the other conveniences (maybe calls and text-by-voice-only; while I get that these also increase reaction time substantially you at least have your head up) because it will only pair with other phones if the driver surrendered theirs to start the car.

limiting power to fairly modest acceleration would anger a lot of gearheads

All of the EVs worth buying out-accelerate even the higher end of gas-powered sports cars. It's not the "gun nuts gearheads" you need to worry about having special guns that hold more than 10 rounds in a magazine amazing acceleration because a significant number of normal people who bought new cars over the last few years have them for reasons mostly unrelated to those performance numbers.

Of course, they're also probably the worst cars to have that power because they're way harder to stop- a Tesla weighs an extra ton over a comparable gas car- and because of that mass, they "win" when colliding with a normal car (something that isn't obvious like it is for SUVs).

Sure, you could go tiered licensing to drive them (and most EVs and especially Teslas are built in such a way that crippling their acceleration would be trivial with an OTA update), but now you're directly fighting the EVs-at-any-cost political faction, you damaged the ability of existing owners to quietly enjoy their property, and most people aren't going to bother (the people that would already drive fast gas-powered cars, because they value the ability to turn corners more than raw acceleration).

SUVs aren't going to ever go away mainly because the population is aging and those people find climbing up easier than climbing down (and they're generally above most of the LED high-beams that might as well be military dazzlers, and give the illusion of better visibility because collision standards have made it so you can't see much of anything out of modern cars), so you'll probably have to take that class of vehicle from their cold dead hands.

I think you're making this problem a lot more complicated than it actually is. A lot of deaths could be prevented with a few classes of changes: separate cars from pedestrians and cyclists, and use road design to encourage safety. People gravitate to driving at the speed which feels safe; narrower lanes and roads naturally encourage slower driving, because you're closer to other vehicles, roadside barriers, etc. There's a huge number of other things you could implement as well. And if you assume that people will screw up, it becomes clear that you should design infrastructure to be safe even when someone does make an error.

Over-indexing on phones specifically doesn't do anything about speeding, other forms of distraction, drunk driving, or just regular old human error.

Not just bikes has some videos on traffic calming and related topics:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA&ab_channel=NotJustBikes

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc&ab_channel=NotJustBikes

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_ByEBjf9ktY

SUVs aren't going to ever go away mainly because the population is aging and those people find climbing up easier than climbing down (and they're generally above most of the LED high-beams that might as well be military dazzlers, and give the illusion of better visibility because collision standards have made it so you can't see much of anything out of modern cars), so you'll probably have to take that class of vehicle from their cold dead hands.

Car size is also an issue, but this paragraph is pretty baffling to me. Given how high some SUVs and trucks are, I don't believe for a moment that they're easier for anyone with limited mobility than a sedan or smaller SUV or crossover--you have to climb up and down in any case anyway, to get both in and out. Safetywise, SUVs are a defection that only become "necessary" if others already have them; ditto for the issue with elevated lights. If you limit the number of high and heavy vehicles on most roads, and how bright their lights are, then much of the motivation to buy them goes away.

doesn't do anything about speeding, other forms of distraction, drunk driving, or just regular old human error.

Thinking about this harder, maybe it's all nothingburger.

After all, compared to 10 and 20 years ago, distracted driving rates are way up, vehicle performance is way up (cars have turbochargers they didn't have before, and cars with 400+ horsepower doing 0-60 in 4 seconds didn't exist below 50,000 USD until just a few years ago), blind spots are way bigger, night driving is even more difficult, and the average vehicle is both heavier and taller.

Because of those things we should expect harder and more deadlier crashes.

But that's not what the data shows. Compared to 10 years ago, the rate of traffic fatalities in the US dropped by a quarter (per mile travelled). So if all of those things actually did increase fatalities significantly, and it seems like a reasonable thing to assume would increase, our safety standards are clearly outpacing any and all of the negative effects they have (and to think that the average car on the road today, being made in 2010, doesn't even have the infotainment systems that allow you to send a text without looking down).

So maybe the best solution really is "nothing, just have more and more technology to make distracted and high-speed driving safer and safer available at lower and lower pricepoints". I'm not that happy with that because those safety standards make me feel I'm more likely to cause an accident because of reduced visibility inherent to those safety standards (extra-thick A pillers, huge blindspots) and all that tech getting damaged makes collision repair far more expensive, but clearly they're having a positive effect in aggregate so maybe I'm complaining too much about it.

Thinking about this harder, maybe it's all nothingburger.

The US saw over 40,000 traffic fatalities in 2021 and car crashes are one of the leading causes of death for young people. This hardly seems like a nothingburger (do you think crime is a nothingburger? Homicides are something like half that or less).

But that's not what the data shows. Compared to 10 years ago, the rate of traffic fatalities in the US dropped by a quarter (per mile travelled).

What data? The table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year seems to show either flat or slightly increasing deaths per million VMT, depending on whether you're looking before or after the pandemic as your end point. It's even worse if you look at pedestrian deaths, which are way up. And heavy SUVs are contributing to this trend.

Certain technological innovations have improved the ability of vehicles to either alert the driver or protect them in case of a crash. Also, as 2020 showed, congestion can reduce automobile fatalities. These developments are offsetting the effects you mention, but that doesn't mean that distracted driving and heavier vehicles aren't a problem.

clearly they're having a positive effect in aggregate so maybe I'm complaining too much about it.

Based on the data I've seen, the aggregate effect is negative, but also there's no need to couple these things. Repeal CAFE, make narrower lanes and smaller parking spots, add traffic calming, harsher penalties for distracted or reckless driving leading to injury, maybe even tax heavier vehicles.

Swimming pool regulation is out of control in Australia. Friends of mine have a huge rural property with a lake (fish and everything, even a small dam). The council wants them to increase the fencing on their swimming pool lest some child walk for about 10 minutes up to the house, get over an insufficiently high fence or through a fairly substantial hedge and drown. So much easier to just drown in the unfenced, easily available lake!

There's a bunch of passive-aggressive and plain aggressive letters going back and forth. It's a complete waste of everyone's time. We would be much better off with fewer regulations on irrelevant stuff like this - focus all that fire and fury on serious matters like gain-of-function.

Such a plot point was an ongoing saga in a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Is there some irony that we're talking about burdensome Australian swimming pool regulation in a gun-control thread?

Edit: the joke being that (so I hear) Australian gun control regulation is also burdensome

HelmedHorror brought it up. My broader point is that regulations have all kinds of stifling and inhibitory effects that aren't easily noticed, plus they're interpreted by deliberately malicious and unreasonable cretins.

Sorry, to be clear I thought what you had to say was interesting and relevant. It had to be said though, I was hoping it would just be one of many comments and wouldn’t be disruptive

Mitchell and Webb comedy skit on drowning

Haven't heard this one before. Excellent.

Announcer: Surely one death by drowning is one too many?

Mitchell: That's a ridiculous thing to say.

"Everyone has to die, and in a balanced, fair, and democratic society, some of them should drown."

Because the comparison fails on its basic premise. You don’t need a license to buy a car in most states; you could send your ten year old to a dealership with shopping bags full of cash to buy a new one, at least in theory. What is prohibited is operating a vehicle on a public road without a license(and US drivers licenses are easier to get than most internationally). And taking a gun out in public until recently did require a license, either a concealed carry license(perhaps too easy to get, but definitely a license), or a hunting license. Firearms insurance exists, but is less necessary than auto insurance because nearly all injuries caused by firearms are caused by intentional misuse which wouldn’t be covered by insurance anyways.

Finally there’s the question of what a gun license is. I mean yes it’s true that every country on earth except the US and Yemen(and for shotguns, Switzerland and Austria) requires something called a license to own a gun, but there’s a pretty wide variation in terms of what a license is, in some countries it’s just a tax stamp and in others it’s the culmination of a lengthy process involving several years of lessons and close supervision. The actually effective part of most licensing schemes is probably background checks, which are already the law in the USA.

In the US the comparison is kinda silly for the gun control set and not because of the Second Amendment. The US does NOT have strict car licensing requirements; typically if you're 18 (or 16 with certain additional easy requirements) and have a pulse you can likely get a license. The gun equivalent would be being able to fire a gun once or twice and hit, not necessarily the target, but at least the backstop. Insurance is required in case of accidents but only accidents; it does not cover deliberate misuse, and so if it existed for guns it would be cheap. Further, it's only required for use on public roads. An 18 year old with an easy-to-get license and sufficient cash can buy any car whatsoever, and operate any street legal vehicle (except, oddly, a motorcycle, though that's another not-hard license) of 26,000 pounds or less. Which includes everything from a Smart for Two (used) to a 25,999 lb box truck to a McLaren F1 supercar.

Only the operation of vehicles on public property is regulated. A 12 year old can buy or build and then operate a funny car capable of going 300 mph on private property with no insurance, inspection, registration, background check, or license. Also that funny car can be transported between private properties without being insured, inspected, registered, or licensed.


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