site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37911 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I happen to have heard about how the eviction moratorium works. It defacto means that poor tenants don't have to pay their rent, but the landlords still have expenses. And most landlords are not giant corporations. It's like a law demanding that grocery stores give poor people free food. And it was ended because the Supreme Court said it was illegal. Congress "letting the support expire" is true from a certain point of view, but misleading; it was pushed through out of process and the Supreme Court said that Congress had to authorize it, which never happened.

This does not make me hopeful that the rest of this Gish gallop is accurate.

Georgist land value taxes are probably the best possible solution, and it is kind of annoying to constantly see people constantly being oblivious to them and conflating landlords with "the rich" as if capitalists who create products that people can consensually choose whether to buy or ignore are the same thing as landlords who hold not-homelessness hostage from everyone born without a huge amount of money to buy into the Ponzi scheme of land ownership.

A fair start to life is one in which everyone starts from zero, with nothing but the support of their parents and an equal share of the land and the bounty of nature. One in which you can go out into the land and use it to feed yourself and clothe yourself and build more and better things, and trade with others doing the same. In so far as land privitization of land has deprived everyone from the ability to do this, it is only fair and just that they be compensated for the value of the land. Not by giving them some vaguely defined "wealth redistribution" of arbitrary source or amount from "people who we think ought to help them", but by directly taxing the land equal to the value it provides as "rent", and distributing it to people either in the form of UBI and/or cuts to other taxes (or a combination of both). Anyone with less than an average amount of land should be paid by people with an above average amount of land (weighted by the land values). And if that's not enough to feed and clothe them, then they can work to make up the difference. But it will at least establish a baseline that removes the exploitation of landlords while not punishing capitalists who actually create value and inhibiting them from continuing to create value. (Also, reducing income taxes will significantly help employment rates and wages)

Georgism is just communism by another name. And it is theft of workers wages. It assumes create land value isn’t work. But I can find expensive land a mile away from free land in many major US cities.

What Georgism is; it’s a solid internet gospel for a certain group of people.

Unusually expensive land is created by externalities of labor and capital. If a bunch of people build businesses and and apartments and stuff in a certain place, it will cause the land value of surrounding areas to rise. People working jobs and engaging in productive behaviors capture some of the value themselves, give some of the value to their customers, and have some of it diffuse into nearby land as rents. Except in the rare case where one person owns all of the land in an area, this added rent value is captured by a different person than those who rightfully created it.

Therefore, the workers wages are already being stolen. Well, not exactly stolen, it's not as if surrounding land owners are deliberately taking it from them. It's automatically taken by the nature of economics, that's how externalities work. Taxing it and then giving it back to the surrounding community actually gives the workers more of their own value.

At the very least, even if you're some radical libertarian who believes literally all taxes are theft, you should at least recognize land value taxes as the least bad tax for economic reasons of land values being inelastic, and thus a potential compromise given that you're never going to convince the majority of the population to shut down the entire government.

I just don’t deny that real estate people create value. It’s not some zero deadweight costs thing. Building communities which is what real estate developers do creates value and that is largely captured thru land appreciation.

There are people who just get lucky in the stock market too. Then there are security analysts that get capital to the right firms and hold management accountable. Just because some people are free riding doesn’t mean the people doing good work aren’t creating value and deserve to be compensated.

Most the people who are Georgists seem to be in tech. And there’s a lot of zero productivity going on there. People focused on making products more addictive, bitcoin, HFT etc. Zero sum games for the most part.

If we ignore the stuff about the workers creating the value (which makes this real labor-theory-of-value communism, not just Georgist land communism), the issue is that one landowner improving his land increases the land value of adjacent parcels. But then if you look again, you see that typically multiple landowners have improved their land, and each is providing a positive externality to all the others. Georgism proposes to tax away not only all the positive externalities, but also all the value the landowner contributed to their own land. It's hard to see how this is better for the landowner than just losing the value of the externality!

We want people to create positive externalities. Which is why Georgism doesn’t work. You don’t want to tax good things.

And ideally you would tax that too. A sophisticated version of Georgism would include pigouvian taxes on behaviors with negative externalities, or natural monopolies, intellectual property, and other economic niches with fixed supply that one person snatching up deprives others of being able to do.

It's just that land is the easiest to assess and the most high value, and the most reasonably confident that most of its value is not created by the owner. Even if say, 5% of land value is created by real estate developers on their own property, that would mean 95% is not, either inherent to the land itself or created by other people nearby. So even if land value taxes are not entirely costless (although the more zealous Georgists pretend that they are), they're still one of the least bad taxes possible (only being beaten out by pigouvian taxes which disincentivize negative behaviors like pollution)

Even if I assume your assumptions are correct (I don’t) that remaining 5% is extremely important. It’s literally the entire incentive to build. No 5%. No cities.

I think you're missing distinction between base land value and capital improvements. You don't tax the buildings themselves, or the entire property value, you set the tax rate according to the underlying value of the land itself (which can be assessed separately from the building's value, and real estate agents do this all the time). Which is entirely externalities from other nearby stuff. Whatever value a property has from invested capital improvements contained within itself is exempt from the land value tax. If done properly, the incentive to build is the same as the incentive to invest money in any other form of capital (and the same the vast majority of people have when they build in the current system): you can either extract money from it over time, (which is not taxed in a full Georgist system), or sell it for a profit, which people are willing to buy because they can then extract money from it over time. In fact, people are more incentivized to build with land value taxes, because it's becomes the only way for a landlord to earn profit. You can't just buy a piece of land and sit on it as it appreciates in value, or extract rents based on its favorable location that everyone wants to be in. You have to build and upkeep structures that create value such that people are willing to pay to live there, or useful buildings that earn profit, above and beyond the taxed land rent value.

Which is entirely externalities from other nearby stuff.

The land value is not "entirely externalities from other nearby stuff", unless you arbitrarily set it that way, which results in weird things like total land value going down as the result of consolidating multiple improved parcels.

More comments

I understand the difference. Base value a developer couldn’t make any money off of. If it costs 50k in capital improvements then a Georgists tax would mean the building can be sold for max 50k. No compensation for development.

Fully understand Georgist. Just think it’s wrong and is basically just another form of communism but this time one group decided another group specifically was bad. It might make sense in some land poor area. But America isn’t land poor. There’s land everywhere.

IMO sitting on land and waiting for it to appreciate can be extremely efficient. Neighborhoods grow up over time. They now build 80-100 stories in my neighborhood. They were building 50 stories a decade ago. 20-30 years ago it was 20-30 stories. Sitting on land kept them from building smaller buildings and now that the neighborhood can support massive structures they build that.

It's boring at this point but considering that, apparently, the 'progressive' line on poverty hasn't changed much, it's worth noting that race is a factor that shapes what poverty looks like. It has never been a valid move to go from Detroit to Copenhagen and act thunderstruck as to how much better the 'Nordic Model' is to the American one.

That is not to say that there doesn't exist a big problem with poverty. The effects of inflation with regards to basic things like housing are felt everywhere. But since the immediate solution to that problem of reducing immigration isn't allowed by lib/left/progressives, nor, in fact, conservatives, I don't see an end in sight to the 'housing issue' in particular. And I feel like you could run down the list of every single element that constitutes the problem of 'poverty' and come away with a similar result for the vast majority of them.

I think it's ultimately easier for the kind hearted to look at the harrowing reality of poverty and just feel bad about it. To imagine that those suffering are just victims of circumstance. That their true humanity is drowned by the horrors of an evil capitalist system that values profit over kindness. Greed over empathy. And to the extent that they would be right, I'd agree that 'something should be done' to lessen the suffering. To get those who are able 'back on the right track'. To lessen the burden on those who are struggling with 'fighting the good fight'. But, in my experience, there also exists a kind of person that invited every single issue they are facing into their own life. And solving their issues is much more complicated and difficult than any mainstream conception can deal with.

White Americans fail along these metrics far above their European peers.

The murder rate of whites in america is well above twice that of western Europe's total rates when you don't account for the extreme overrepresnstion of non-whites in those statistics in Europe.

Consider Sweden with its recent murder spree and gang wars. The general murder rate is still about half that of white American murders.

The same extends to other areas. The rate of homelessness for white Americans is about 2-4x that of general homelessness in western Europe ( and far higher than any European nation), and the homeless are far more anti-social.

All that said, I don't think that adopting a "European" approach will necessarily solve America's issues, and the same goes for the growing issues in nations like Sweden.

That's true and not true depending on what state/country you are looking at. Vermont has a very similar homeless population to Ireland, for example. I'm also terminally skeptical of any white perpetrator rates coming from America considering whites and hispanics are often lumped together. And whilst there are certainly parts of America that are poor, the same can also be said for European countries that aren't western.

They are only lumped together in the FBI UCS statistics though. For homelessness and BJS victimisation studies they are separated and homelessness doesn't seem to correlate with state wealth and looking at an individual state for this seems strange due to the phenomenon where homeless across the country gravitate towards states with more inclement weather and services that cater to them, just like they do in Sweden and end up in Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö.

For victimisation, the crime rate of whites is marginally higher than their murder rate (combined with Hispanics) but if we use the relationship between black victimisation and murder rate and apply that to get an adjusted rate for whites, we still end up with a murder rate far above that of any European wester European country, Nordic or otherwise.

Here are the murder rates per 100,000 people in a bunch of Western European non-microstates and the adjusted white murder rate in the United States:

Norway: 0.49

Italy: 0.53

Austria: 0.66

Portugal: 0.74

Ireland: 0.75

Denmark: 0.83

Germany: 0.87

Netherlands: 0.94

Sweden: 1.07

Finland: 1.12

France: 1.16

United States (adjusted white murder rate): 1.58

Bear in mind that these are total murder rates for the European countries and the same issue with minorites committing disproportionate amount of crime (often even the majority), especially murder, exists here but isn't accounted for.

This doesn't contradict anything I've said. Pending on state and country you have higher or lower rates. For murder various states have marginally higher rates than many EU countries, and are lower or on par with others, such as Finland which stands at 1.5 when we look at intentional homicide victims. As I said before, poverty is a big problem, but if you account for race the problem looks completely different.

Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas.

They have to do a lot more landlording for the money. Renting to non-fuckups is easy - you just advertise the property and cash the rent cheques. If you need a repair done, you can usually give the tenant your handyman's number and tell them to sort it out and send you the bill. Renting to fuckups is painful. Even Desmond points out it is high risk (trash-outs, drug dens, long-term nonpayers whose evictions get dragged out), but it is also more work - chasing late rent, arranging repairs around uncooperative tenants, making sure the place isn't being trashed. And if you rent at the bottom end of the market in your metro area, most of your tenants are fuckups.

I don't see how a 70% tax rate would do anything but destroy the incentive to work harder or innovate more. Or encourage capital to move to a more amenable country or special economic zone.

A country with a top tax rate of more than 70% would probably never be able to engineer the atomic bomb, invent computers, or put a man on the moon.

Except that it happened, and that it was in the good old days.

The prerequisite to all those things was engineering around the 70% rate. Which was indeed accomplished.

Interesting. The top tax rate in 1952 was 92% for a married couple filing jointly for income over $400,000 in 1952 dollars (about 4.5m in todays dollars).

I still can't see anyone willingly paying that, so I wonder what tax structures they had available during those times.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that poverty should be reduced through wealth distribution

Same. But an ivory tower academic painting a rosy picture of property management in the slums via earnings-gap arguments is a red flag. That same academic being a "rising star" and getting a sudden friendly profile in the mainstream media is another red flag. His area of expertise being sociology is another.

“We’ve told the story about the poor by focusing on the poor themselves and their neighbourhoods. We’ve left out this larger picture of how we’re implicated,” says Desmond.

I'm sorry, what is he on about? Everything is systemic nowadays. You can't even blame people's individual decisions for them getting fat anymore.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that poverty should be reduced through wealth distribution

I'm not. Theft is immoral. And something given has no value.

You will not reduce poverty by gifting the poor the rich's wealth. You will just make everyone poor and centralize power in unsustainable ways. We've been through this before countless times. It doesn't work.

Theft is immoral. And something given has no value.

Those two are normative statements.

You will not reduce poverty by gifting the poor the rich's wealth.

And this statement is positive, and it doesn't follow from those before it.

It doesn't work.

That's what almost every state in the world does (except Haiti, maybe). Including Singapore, Nordic countries, United States... Or are you a hardcore libertarian who is against taxation?

Well of course, I'm making the two arguments against it: the ethical deontological one, and the practical utilitarian one.

It's evil and it won't work.

That's what almost every state in the world does

And as we can plainly see, none of them have eliminated poverty, and the harder they try this method the more disastrous the consequences get. QED.

are you a hardcore libertarian who is against taxation?

In this I am a mere liberal. I think having people pay for the commons is necessary. I think having people pay to give to others is tyranny. The security of one's property being a natural right, etc.

The supreme courts of nominally liberal countries have thankfully agreed with me so far if the schemes of thievery are blatant enough. Though it doesn't stop people from trying to ruin themselves and their fellow countrymen evidently.

And as we can plainly see, none of them have eliminated poverty, and the harder they try this method the more disastrous the consequences get. QED.

None of the countries with police and a penal system eliminated crime => We should abolish police. QED

I think having people pay for the commons is necessary.

Where does paying for commons end and unjust redistribution starts? Public schools? Public infrastructure in some Podunk and rural areas where just a handful of people would benefit from it at the expense of urban folk?

Also oftentimes "libertarians" (not necessarily you) forget their opposition to redistributive "theft" as long as their favorite topic is concerned. Ah, so great for Orban to implement policies that might increase fertility, like cash payments to young parents! We should subsidize local businesses to compete with China! Veterans should have access to cheap healthcare and education!

It's evil

And some might say that not giving when you are able to is evil

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2022:9&version=KJV

I am not an advocate for redistributive policies, but I don't find "you will not reduce poverty by gifting the poor the rich's wealth" argument persuasive.

None of the countries with police and a penal system eliminated crime

Crime tends to diminish with increased policing. Poverty doesn't diminish with increased redistribution.

Where does paying for commons end and unjust redistribution starts?

There are many opinions amongst liberals on this, as you know. As a Hobbesian I tend to take a much larger view that may include a sense of the people's welfare so I'd go as far as social security schemes being legitimate even as I'm skeptical of their long term viability in practice.

The clear bright line is confiscation. You can't take from someone for the purpose to give to someone else. Redistribution qua redistribution is tyranny.

In my country legal precedent sets this to at least include 70%+ tax brackets on anybody. Of course my ideal state only really collects tariffs and not silly things like income taxes, and I personally view property and income taxes to be confiscatory. Good sensible centrist that I am, historically speaking.

not giving when you are able to is evil

Of course it is. But confiscating property also is. Charity at the point of the sword is no charity at all.

"And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just."

I don't find "you will not reduce poverty by gifting the poor the rich's wealth" argument persuasive.

Why? We've tried it. God knows we've tried it. Over millions of bodies we've tried it. Over centuries we've tried it. Only to find ruin every time.

I think history shows the poor are better served with good government than with the delusions of socialism. I should rather ask you why you think it would work this time.

What would I give for a newspaper or magazine, which instead of starting with a premise (America's poor have it bad) and then seeking arguments in favour of it, no matter how flimsy, deploying them as soldiers, it would search for evidence based on on its validity, not what it appears to show. It occured to me that submarine advertising, might be part of the problem, but it would be ineffective without sympathetic journalists who do not hold " the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" to be their highest ideal.

“If the top 1 per cent of income earners just paid the taxes they owed, the country would raise an additional $175bn a year. That’s almost enough money to fill the poverty gap.” But to blame the 1 per cent alone is too easy and too “absolving”, and Desmond has a “reflex against things that absolve us”. He points to the broader chunk of the American population — perhaps the richest quarter, many of them avowed liberals — who hoover up tax credits,

Notice how the article omits the total amount of taxes paid the "1%" and how much is that as fraction of all taxes paid by the entire population.

who hoover up tax credits, demand cheap goods and oppose the construction of affordable housing where they live.

If the law on the books says, in both letter and spirit, one is entitled to pay less tax if one marries/gets a mortage/whatever the state deems worthy of promoting, and you disagree with that incentive, change the law or encourage people to donate to the government. Also no statistics presented by the article.

He also blames racism for public reluctance to increase some welfare benefits. “A tonne of evidence shows that, if people think a benefit is going to black people or non-white people, they’re far less likely to support it.”

Do all races of America exhibit equal levels of support for giving their money to non-members, or are whites particularly ingroup preferential?

Desmond wants the wealthy to “take less” in exchange for a safer, fairer, less anxious society. Are they ready to listen?

The people that already give the most society, by inventing, investing, subsidising by being early adopters, and paying the most tax, and accused of "taking". I didn't think such inversion of reality was possible.

The right says the poor are hooked on welfare, but he estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars a year in benefits are unclaimed.

OK, but how much welfare do the poor "hoover up", and what fraction of that is the metaphorical hammock?

The federal poverty rate — 11.6 per cent in 2021 — has been roughly flat since 1970.

Isn't poverty rate calculated based pretax cash income and does not include non-cash benefits from housing subsidies, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or other forms of government relief? So even if this activists ideas of giving money away would be implemented, this statistic would remain unchanged.

They are buffeted by bad wages and anti-union legislation.

As long immigration isn't recognized by anti-poverty activists to harm wages of the indigenous poor and is instead even promoted, complaints about consequences of policies they champion are void.

In any other context people of the same trade meeting together, is looked at with suspicion, the word "cartel" gets thrown around and conspiracy against the remainder of the population is suspected, anti-monopoly laws are enacted. But if it is the activists prefered ingroup attempting to collect rent, laws protecting the people from the schemes of the few fall silent.

Which is easier?

Building new housing for rich people, or

Building new housing for poor people.

If society supplies more of one good than the other, of course the people who participate in the less supplied market are going to earn a larger return, the government is effectively handing them market power. If you want to reduce their income, allow developers to build more housing aimed at poor people.

Building housing for poor people isn’t really a thing. Poor people housing is generally older housing that’s been depreciated and rich people buy the new housing.

Poor people housing is most of housing in poor countries and almost all 20th century housing in the Eastern Bloc, and the lion's share of housing that me and almost everyone I've known, rich or poor, have lived in until relatively recently.

On this note, I've never understood American problem with public housing, and their weird superstition that building a «project» causally leads to social dysfunction (particularly widespread among conservatives). Is it just that they haven't discovered ways for managing their underclass other than a) dispersing them over large territories and b) incarceration?

On this note, I've never understood American problem with public housing, and their weird superstition that building a «project» causally leads to social dysfunction (particularly widespread among conservatives)

It's not superstition, it's experience.

On this note, I've never understood American problem with public housing, and their weird superstition that building a «project» causally leads to social dysfunction (particularly widespread among conservatives). Is it just that they haven't discovered ways for managing their underclass other than a) dispersing them over large territories and b) incarceration?

Imagine working Russians never having to buy an apartment in Murino, because they can either earn enough to live and build a house in their own hometown or rent an apartment in St Petersburg proper. Who would remain in the human anthills then?

In a way, it's a cruel mirror image of the American Blacks who were once redlined into specific neighborhoods, the poor and the relatively prosperous forced to live together.

In my experience, urban Eastern Europe/Russia doesn't have true ghettoes (excepting aberrant spots like, I dunno, Gypsy communities and hyper-concentrations of immigrant labor), and even the worst spots are massively overhyped by helicoptering same-sex couples (mother and grandma) – you can reasonably safely go there, rent there, do business there, even live your whole life there. If you have normal situational awareness, then the worst that will typically happen is you'll be sometimes woken up by high-pitched screams of fallen women and gopnik cackling as some unlucky bastard is getting the shit kicked out of him; or be asked by the poor wife of your 300 pound neighbor and the district officer to help carry him up the stairs as he struggles and curses under the breath (parse this last scenario as you will).

There's very little in the way of gang activity, wanton murders, arson, high-effort burglary, and other things you positively cannot brush off by reading Aurelius, working out and investing in ear plugs.

Piss and petty vandalism is a bit annoying, but more or less a solved issue in the last two decades. And that's Russia.

Maybe my standards are just low.

Sometimes when people look at things like crime rates in Europe, they note that homicide rates are fairly high in Finland, compared to Western European countries. This often comes as a surprise because welfare state etc.

I've lived in "high-murder" areas pretty much all my life, yet I've often visited the shops at night, gone out for walks etc. and have not felt particularly unsafe. I'm not very physically imposing, yet I don't fear to go out, even when newspapers feature regular stories about murders in my hoods. Why? Because everyone knows there's a very familiar pattern to these Finnish murders: a bunch of alcoholics are having a "party" (ie. drinking booze) to the wee hours of the night, at one point two of them get into an argument over a bottle of booze (or maybe one of them has looked at another one's lady friend the wrong way etc.), one stabs another, in the morning everyone's passed out on the floor and as they start slowly getting up they notice one isn't getting up. As long as you don't go to one of those "parties" - and they're not particularly hard to avoid if you aren't in the bottomed-out alcoholic community - you are very unlikely to get stabbed.

Stories about (immigrant) youth gangs attacking people on the street thus get a rise out of people in a way that "ordinary" murder stories don't, since it's not just "those people" suffering, it might be normal middle-class people and their kids. Which is to be expected, of course.

Is it something like this in these instances, too?

Pretty much – we have similar problems with alcohol, if nothing else. Though I'd say such scenarios don't even need stabby activities – one can fall (or be made to fall) on the kitchen table the wrong way; and then the district policeman will recall he has other unsolved cases (since we do have quite a lot of «real» murders and disappearances, with the body discovered in the local woods and no actionable leads). and this low-class scum can't very well plead innocence, so…

This is the second time in a short while I've come across something interesting about Finnish drinking culture. Do you know more about it? Apparently, you don't drink casually on weeknights but then Friday/Saturday it's literally (I think they have a term for it) "drink until you shit yourself" time?

Yes, that's the stereotypical idea. Like, I don't drink until I shit myself, but then again I have two small kids, and I've cut back on my drinking radically.

There has existed a constant low-level campaign to make Finns drink in a "more European way" (ie. more on the weekdays, less binging on weekends) or reduce alcohol use in general. (mandatory Polandball comic) I don't think the "European way" has ever took hold, but alcohol use is generally down, especially among the youth, possibly because they don't want to repeat the cultural patterns of the older generations.

"Finnish drinking culture" is a very vast topic, is there something more specific you want to know about it?

More comments

So your example looks like an adequate analogy to Eastern Europe conditions (except for prices), which was my point: those are passable conditions, and not deserving of the attitude like they pose mortal danger; tiling cheap land with communalkas and enabling the underclass (and anyone not rich enough for better things) to live in such conditions is preferable to encouraging homelessness and the eviction cycle. I'd hypothesize that the debuffs of «ghetto» and «project» stack in the statistical sense, and Americans expect them to.

More importantly, my frustration has to do with the American belief that dense housing somehow begets dysfunction – I've seen takes riffing off the Universe 25/Behavioral Sink narrative that purported to explain why projects are fucked up, and it just sounds inane.

You're about correct it seems. I'm aware of the «Bad Old Days» mostly theoretically – witnessing a corpse with leaking brain tissue in the yard in the mid-90s, junkies dismembering a dog, hobo pack occupying the hallway etc. is about the maximum of my exposure. Stories of getting beat for venturing into An Alien Neighborhood, which my siblings and people of that cohort have conveyed to me, were kind of stale by then; in my generation, I've only met (somewhat confused) people who LARPed that culture but weren't born into it.

Regardless, this is a present-time discussion, and not specific to Russia.

...Is this real?

On this note, I've never understood American problem with public housing, and their weird superstition that building a «project» causally leads to social dysfunction (particularly widespread among conservatives).

It's totally possible to build a functional housing project, just as it's totally possible to run a functioning school, for certain definitions of "function". The problem for Americans are that our currently-enforced definition of "function" is in fact impossible to achieve, and changing it is pretty close to a coup-complete problem. If you try to do things the way that works, the full power of the Government will be turned to wrecking your project.

Because American housing projects are terrible and full of dysfunction and crime.

It’s totally plausible that a country better at running things, or bad at running things in a different way, would have housing projects that aren’t, but that is not what we are.

I agree, but there’s nothing to be done. We can’t roll back mass immigration which lowered wages and bargaining power. We can’t stop immoral corporations from pushing out soul-rotting music. We can’t persuade a liberal that mandatory education is terrible for the young who are destined to be in the lowest quadrant of income bracket. And you can’t have low rent in urban areas without legalizing discrimination based on IQ testing, appearance, and demographic issues. Finally, the attention span of the rich is artificially captured by DNC-Machine dramas, from the George Floyd saga to “we need more female surgeons” and “look at this poor brown child at the border” and infinite other fancies. Our new upper class will be less White, and I doubt they have the same ingrained emotional neuroticism of the previous upper class, so it will be more difficult to persuade them on these issues. Are wealthy Asian and Indians and Hapas and half-Jews going to shed a tear for poor white/black Americans? No. They are too busy gunning it at work and hustling in their social lives. The reason White people at least pretended to care for the poor was the remnant of a Christian culture with clear demands and a romanticized spirit of charity (if not genetics).

The up-and-coming Left cares even less for the poor than their predecessors. Genuinely, maybe the California Left have the best idea: just legalize stealing from large corporations. Then legalize stealing the wealthy’s cars, and then mugging them. Expand squatter’s rights to just a couple months in unused second homes. This will only help a little, but it would at least be very funny.

There are certainly red flags indicating that he is not a particularly rigorous thinker. Eg:

Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts . . . There are caveats: the relationship is not true in a few top cities, such as New York ...

If you are worried about housing affordability, the opposite of NYC is presumptively a good thing. And if landlords can make more money renting to poor people, that is good, because it encourages building more housing in poor areas, or building a building with many small apartments, rather than a handful of giant apartments, as often happens in Manhatten.

He lived on a mobile home park in Milwaukee — about 130 trailers in “a really poor place in a really poor city”. Desmond calculated that the owner earned about $447,000 a year after expenses. “That blew me away. His tenants are getting by on $600-$700 a month.”

Assuming his numbers are correct, it actually a good thing that people with income of $700 per month can afford housing, and it is a good thing that someone can earn a living providing it to them.

And it turned out that the mum had just died, and after the funeral the kids just went on living in the house. Mattresses on the floor, eating what they could. They just evicted the kids. Put the kids out, called social services, put their stuff on the curb, changed the locks, moved to the next house. That’s a level of deprivation that I never experienced — a level of cruelty.”

It is cruel to refer orphans who are "eating what they could" to social services?

The poor might have cheap consumer goods, but rents are more expensive and prison more pervasive. In the US of the 1930s and 1940s, “eviction was often a very rare, ...

If you are even hinting that the poor were better-off in the 1930s, ie, the Great Depression, something has gone wrong.

Would it be fair to say that in Anglophone countries, as a consequence of Protestantism and the social trauma of the Industrial Revolution, poverty is largely seen as a result of moral sins and failures in a way that it is not elsewhere?

No, because if you look into the theology of the Protestant work ethic, poverty stems from other sins (mostly sloth). It's not a sin in the way lying, adultery, or murders are sins.

ETA: Broadly speaking, Americans have a very weird relationship with money. If I have money, it's because I worked hard and was smart. If you have money, it's because you're a thieving, conniving bastard. Or, as Lighting Hopkins wrote, "It's a sin to be rich, it's a lowdown shame to be poor."

Edited it accordingly.

Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas.

Congratulations, you've rediscovered the relationship between rental yields and desirability. It holds everywhere: a new apartment in the capital will be at 2-4%, while a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere is at 10%+. As the landlords say: 'location, location, location'. It's free money, just buy the crappiest real estate and sail to the bahamas with your ill-gotten gains. If only you could find the tenants.

Yea I thought everyone knew the rental yields here vary.

Also key to this cap rate difference is desirable areas have high land values to capex values. Capex values depreciate. Land usually appreciates. A lot of the difference in yield is just difference in depreciation. And some of it is poor people don’t pay rent and require more owner work.

In a vain attempt to hijack this into the "Get rich on real estate TODAY!" thread on The Motte...

I ran a cross a twitter thread years ago that made the case for investing in multi-family real estate in "forever emerging" neighborhoods. This would be areas outside of an obviously attractive Metro that may be seen as "up and coming." That's easy enough to look up right now. The tricky part is finding something in that emerging neighborhood that both keeps it from becoming just the next development path out of the metro, and also prevents it from going bust. The thread mentioned a few military bases that are within 1 - 2 hours of a major metro as an example; the Military doesn't go out of business, so the area won't disappear even in a recession, but because the military skews younger, lower-middle-class-er, and male-er, a trendy Whole Foods anchored shopping center with the $3k 1-bedrooms isn't going to pop up either. These are properties with cap rates higher than you would expect but without the occasional sunk cost of an eviction, the higher rates of repair due to lack of maintenance, crime, etc.

Any hardcore Real Estate folks on here care to comment. I have no idea if the thread I'm (half) citing is valid ... not even if I'm representing it totally correctly as this is from memory at the moment.

Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas.

“The reason is that property values, mortgages and taxes are much lower in downmarket neighbourhoods, but rents aren’t that much lower,” says Desmond.

This seems like an entirely underexplored question. Desmond seems to have arrived at a conclusion that supports his theory and then done nothing to challenge that conclusion.

If the top 1 per cent of income earners just paid the taxes they owed, the country would raise an additional $175bn a year.

This is a child's understanding of the tax code.

The right says the poor are hooked on welfare, but he estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars a year in benefits are unclaimed.

This is a non sequitur.

This whole screed just reads like a Bernie sanders stump speech, filled with applause lights and very little substance. Nearly every paragraph makes some bombastic claim that may be true in a lying with statistics way but almost certainly is not true in the way he's trying to use it to imply injustice. But he's not trying to reason, he's trying to preach.

He's probably talking total tax credits which includes things like banks building low income housing for tax credits.

There’s really not a lot interesting in this. It’s just standard Bernie Sanders versus Milton Friedman type arguments and counter arguments for why it’s really good we don’t tax the rich 70%. Being that America is a huge outlier in terms of wealth based on national IQ it seems the Friedman camp was correct.

The only thing interesting that doesn’t get said a lot is that America would be more socialists if we were less diverse. This seems fundamentally true to me.

My basic reaction to this piece is how does Desmond on the one hand believe the 1% are super greedy people and on the other hand believe there is an obvious easy to exploit arbitrage in rental markets that these greedy people aren’t pursuing?

Perhaps an answer that seems to elude Desmond is that renting at the bottom of the market is different compared to renting at the top of the market and therefore different returns result from different inputs.

It strikes me that these academics Seemingly always start with the idea that the 1% are both greedy and leaving billion dollar bills laying freely on the ground. It’s one thing to note there are occasional market inefficiencies. There are of course. But something of this magnitude?

Who typically earns more in today’s America: a landlord in a poor neighbourhood or one in a rich neighbourhood?

You might assume the posh landlord, whose tenants bring more money and less risk. But according to Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, you would be wrong.

I suppose this is a good example of how much of a bubble I live in that everyone that I spend much time talking to about finances would understand this to be an intuitive and obvious result, not a surprise. That the tenants bring more money and less risk immediately implies that the rate of return should be expected to be lower in any environment where the investors are decently informed about the relative expected profits and risk profiles. This is the opposite of surprising, it's an expected, intuitive, and appropriate outcome. One doesn't even need to get into how unpleasant dealing with lower class tenants is, just including the increased scale and decreased risk of higher class tenants makes the result that landlords willing to serve the lower class will have higher margins obvious.

To move onto pieces that aren't as obvious to people who haven't dealt with rental properties at all, we can then add that low-class tenants require much more time investment to deal with damage to properties, evictions, collection of payment, and even crime. Since property management requires actual labor rather than just being an input-free source of profit, it stands to reason that the increase management labor will further increase the required ratio of rent to capital. I suppose on some level this isn't quite fair for a poor tenant actually does their best to make payment, but in the aggregate, I'm not seeing the unfairness.

On a subjective level, I absolutely promise that I would prefer to take lower returns on my investments in exchange for not dealing with the underclass - I cannot exaggerate how terrible the poor are to deal with when it comes to rental properties. The endless array of excuses, the filth that many of these people live in and subject property to, the low-level criminality, the lying about other occupants and pets, the badly behaved children that destroy cupboards, trim, and other pieces of property... it's all more than you can imagine if you're a normal middle-class person. All any normal investor wants is to put up capital, provide a decent service, and receive payment in return for it, but you're going to get much more than you bargained for if you sign up to provide housing to the poor.

America isn't poor. America is expensive. At minimum wage, you're already richer than the median individual in a European country.

Poverty is easier to eradicate than many other social-ills, because poverty is tangible. Food, shelter, and clothing.

At face value, costs for all 3 are relatively consistent across economies with different purchasing powers. The US as fairly cheap groceries1 for a developed economy) and fast fashion costs the same around the world.

Shelter too is cheap. The US has the most abundant land and houses can be purchased pre-assembled from home-depot to mitigate labor costs.

Wait NO. Shelter isn't cheap.......which brings me to what's the central cause of poverty in this nation : Landlords.

Crucially, many wealthy people — including landlords, lobbyists and middle-class homeowners

Hearing people talk causes of poverty is like hearing about medieval crimes of "Raping and Pillaging". Yeah no, if you were raping, then no one really cares if you also pillaged after. Combining them into a phrase, almost makes raping sound acceptable.

Don't run away from the uncomfortable single group to blame for this. Let's stop caring about 'landlords AND'. Instead let's focus on the landlords themselves. Some landlords are also middle-class salary-men and sometimes they are an investment company like Blackrock, but their secondary identity is irrelevant. When they are a landlord, they are all the same. Landlords the worst kind of burden on the economy. They get paid for hoarding and running what's effectively an extortion racket by limiting where you can build in this country : "pay me whatever I charge, or go homeless. No, you can't manufacture the commodity by yourself." Economically-productive renters lose all purchasing power, and landlords are effectively out of the labor force as they sit on top of feudal-dues extracted from their little 2-bedroom colony. Communists have the worst solutions, but no one points out problems quite as well as a Communist.

The housing extortion racket only works when housing is limited. Let people build and you'll see poverty drop like we've never seen before.

Nothing is entirely monocausal, so I'll do a quick rundown of secondary needs of poor people, how they are and aren't met. (or the pillaging section, as I'd call it)

  • Bad infrastructure = highways only = cars are needs = At least $5k+ $400/month-per-person just to live life vs 100$/month for top-tier subway systems. That's a lot of extra money for poor people.

  • Schools - are free

  • Hospitals - This is a big one, but a bigger topic for another day. (tl;dr - Doctors are evil.)

  • Safety - American small towns are remarkably safe. The lack of safety seems localized to certain communities, than tied poverty as a whole.

  • Wifi ? - Wifi is cheap enough

  • Employment - Unemployment is so low in the US, that the fed can't get people to lose jobs even as it tries its hardest.

Wait NO. Shelter isn't cheap.......which brings me to what's the central cause of poverty in this nation : Landlords.

So if current landlords are so bad, what's to keep anyone from undercutting them? If you're seriously suggesting co-ordination among all the landlords all the way from Blackrock to your middle-class salaryman, I'm not going to believe you.

Hearing people talk causes of poverty is like hearing about medieval crimes of "Raping and Pillaging". Yeah no, if you were raping, then no one really cares if you also pillaged after. Combining them into a phrase, almost makes raping sound acceptable.

Well, no, if you're poor enough, the pillaging might well be worse than the raping. Pretty much nobody in modern America is that poor, fortunately.

So if current landlords are so bad, what's to keep anyone from undercutting them?

Natural monopoly. If everyone around them lowered their prices, they increase their market share. If you're one landlord out of 100 in the middle of a city and there are 100 families in need of housing, it doesn't matter if 99 of them cut their prices... that 100th family is still going to pay you.

Natural monopoly.... in a market that includes everyone from Blackrock to middle-class salarymen? There's at least hundreds of thousands of landlords in NYC alone. There's no monopoly at all, let alone a natural one.

Sure, I'm off on my terminology. Here's what I mean by the problem, maybe you can help me put it into economic terms:

If you and I share the market of soda evenly, and I price mine too high, you can double your production and take all my business. You can't really do that with land.

ETA: just want to acknowledge that yes, it was dumb to use an obviously technical term in a made-up way. My use of the terms I think is like this: It is a "monopoly" in that others are prevented from entering the market, and it is "natural" in that the barrier to entry is the fixed supply/location of land.

There's no special economic term for this situation.

I think your just trying to talk about the idea of land "rent" in the formal theoretical sense of rent. Monopolists also have rents similar theoretically to land rents.

No, the 100th family is just going to move somewhere else.

You are using terms originating from economic theory, but you have an apparent lack of understanding what these terms mean, given that you describe reality which simply does not exist.

You can't just build a house you need approval from the local government to construct housing. Planning departments aren't approving housing construction or density increases that would allow rent to be undercut. There's market power in offering housing for rent, and the planning department enforces it.

what's to keep anyone from undercutting them

Why do you think Blackrock keeps buying every open lot with somewhat permissive zoning and converting it into apartment buildings. This is them trying to undercut the SFH mafia. However, it is in their interest for zoning laws to not get tooo permissive. Because they would suddenly have to be competitive, instead of just being marginally better than a SFH landlord.

As of now, it is illegal to build in most parts of the US. The US has only 1 dense city and that's Manhattan. Include the 5 boroughs, and NYC is remarkably underbuilt for its demand. Who controls if building is legal ? -> the landlords for that locale. (It is not that simple, but I'm skipping over a lot of nuance to make my tl;dr point). That's why I call it a colonial extraction racket.

Pretty much nobody in modern America is that poor, fortunately.

Yep.

So if current landlords are so bad, what's to keep anyone from undercutting them?

Idiotic building and planning regulations. At least here in the UK.

Doctors are evil and landlords have uniform behavior?

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Also known as the "hot take" rule.

If you're saying something that's deeply out of the ordinary or difficult-to-defend, the next person is going to ask you to explain what you mean. You can head this off by explaining what you mean before hitting submit. The alternative is that the first half-dozen responses will all be "can you explain in more detail", which increases clutter and makes it much harder to follow the conversation.

Fair enough.

landlords have uniform behavior

At this point every new-urbanist has made so many videos about this, that I thought the point was obvious enough. 1 2

"Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome."

The current incentives force landlords to behave the way they do. If I was a landlord, I'd be a selfish dick too. Afterall, the system actively promotes it.

Doctors are evil

Full disclosure, I am still working on this thought right how. Not entirely sure if I believe it myself or I am trying to be transgressive for the sake of being transgressive.

But my underdeveloped argument goes as follows:

  • Programmers are idiots

  • Status and wealth of a profession is tied to limiting access

  • Doctors by and large populate all medically relevant structures - from hospitals, to NIH, to Medical university depts, to Govt. health secretary roles

  • They have made no effort to make it easier to be a doctor

  • Introducing AI / tech / new ideas / pathways to be a doctor are limited, not because it keeps medicine safer, but because it keeps doctors a rare commodity

  • GPT-4 is already a better doctor than most

  • Lawyers are very similar, but they conceded control on the university side of things, and their profession has lost a lot of prestige and wealth since

  • Programmers are idiots, we make ourselves obsolete, we make it easy to access our profession, we don't gatekeep and then wonder why it is so competitive

  • Doctors are evil, doctors are effective at extracting all value from their profession, even if it means worse healthcare

  • Be like doctors.

  • Selfless people are idiots

Being selfless has not seemed to have been a bad play for developers so far. The more we try to automate away our jobs the larger the force multiplier one Developer can make and the higher we're paid. Yeah, maybe eventually this virtuous spiral runs out of runway and the last programmer hands the keys to gpt to business people but we've been trying and failing to replace ourselves for decades and the pay just keeps going up.

Hearing people talk causes of poverty is like hearing about medieval crimes of "Raping and Pillaging". Yeah no, if you were raping, then no one really cares if you also pillaged after. Combining them into a phrase, almost makes raping sound acceptable.

This seems like it's pretty badly underrating how bad pillaging actually is. Destroying the wealth of a city can easily have effects that are effectively permanent. When I look at something like the sack of Athens in 267 and the fallout from it, it's the raping that seems like the footnote rather than the pillaging.

Yes, pillaging isn't that bad is something you could only think if you have never had to worry about starvation.

I was actually just reading Brett Devereux's posts on how pre-railroad armies managed logistics, and he made the point repeatedly that there were many cases where peasants starved to death because foraging armies would steal literally everything they could, especially if they were enemies who might even plan on ruling the land. I honestly recommend people read his world-building series to get an understanding of just how much media about medieval times and their wars is straight up anachronistic and hides the brutal reality of pre-railroad wars.

If landlording is evil and should be eliminated where do you propose people who can't afford a down payment on a mortgage live?

Landlords are evil because the system enables them to be evil. The profession will still exist. But transition to a service profession. Similar to agents who manage properties for people.

If housing stops being an asset, it becomes a commodity. People who manage commodities still exist.

I guess I'm confused, what is different between landlords and normal homeowners here? The incentive gradient is the same. The landlord is providing a necesary service, I find it difficult to call that evil. The case would make more sense if scoped to the individuals actually lobbying to keep housing stock low.

I think we single-family homeowners count as lords of our own land also. Along with everyone else who doesn't want to live in an anthill.

Condo owners as well. Why alienate your allies like this?

You haven’t actually answered the question.

What do you propose people who can’t or don’t want to buy a house/condo should live in? I suspect if we go far back enough whoever you got this argument for will say ‘we should socialize unoccupied housing and grant it to poor people’, the answer to which is ‘yeah, you can do that, but they’ll destroy it and the bureaucrats in charge will be utterly unprepared for that’, and that’s before the second order economic effects become a big deal much faster than you probably suspect.

bureaucrats in charge will be utterly unprepared for that’, and that’s before the second order economic effects become a big deal much faster than you probably suspect.

Speaking as an ex bureaucrat who did indeed deal with social housing, why would we be unprepared for that? Damage to property from public tenants though social housing stock is entirely predictable and we would indeed budget for that. You can even then employ your own government contractors to fix said stock.

You can argue about how much it costs or whether it passes cost-benefit analysis but why would you think government bureaucrats will be unprepared for it? Government bureaucrats deal with the public a lot, they're second only to police in how jaded we can get about how people act.

why would we be unprepared for that?

Because the people who are demanding the process in the first place are doing so based on ideology, and their ideology deemphasizes any costs created by the poor, and specifically costs created by bad tenants. So nobody will be prepared for those costs.

And the people demanding stuff of bureaucrats can and have oscillated between literal capitalist privatizers and literal socialists. Doesn't mean your bureaucrats who deal with with where the rubber meets the road will be unprepared. They might not get a budget for it of course but thats not the same thing. Thats just business as usual.

Don't confuse ideology for competence. Anyone with experience maintaining housing stock will know that lesson.

And will probably have a notarized memo in triplicate of exactly when they raised that point to elected member number 94. Most career bureaucrats everywhere in my experience from communist Russia to the USA, the UK, China, and more are not very ideological as much as they are disillusioned with the public.

Building more housing is the obvious and easy solution, but people hate new dense housing being constructed in their area.

Evicted documented how landlords threw out domestic violence victims, because they called 911 frequently.

Or, because they'd have knock-down-drag-outs which disturbed the other tenants, more so when the cops showed up. And of course the domestic violence offender usually lives there too, whether or not they were on the lease.

I lived in an apartment complex long ago and a couple had a late night loud screaming fight. They didn't seem to be physically fighting, so the cops didn't come.

A couple weeks later they had a late night screaming fight again. My roommate and I yelled at them to shut up, but they didn't. They were not evicted, but I would have sure liked it if they were.

Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts

Of course. Would you rather be a landlord for the rich or poor given that you will have to go visit your apartments a lot?

why poor people in the US seem so much worse off

I think the answer is that they aren’t actually worse off, and that you can be considered poor in America while being solidly part of the lower middle class even in other wealthy, developed countries.

having just filled up most of the pages in my passport this last month and having lived 10 years in a country where the average yearly salary is about $6000, absolutely not.

The poor in the US are fucking POOR, they live miserably deprived lives, but they get to eat twinkies!

I just came back from a month in Vietnam, where I didn't see a single homeless person and spoke to plenty of people so poor they basically lived in a barter economy, and they were better off than some of my coworkers when I was in trade.

Desmond documents how the poor are squeezed. There is a Clinton-era welfare programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In 2020, poor families received just 22 cents in every dollar it disbursed. The rest was used by states to pay for things such as job training and even abstinence-only sex education. Meanwhile, George Stigler, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, argued that a higher minimum wage would raise unemployment, but when New Jersey raised its minimum wage, and neighbouring Pennsylvania didn’t, there was negligible effect.

Intractable poverty has been blamed on family breakdown, but Desmond cites a study showing that single parents aren’t poorer in other rich countries. The right says the poor are hooked on welfare, but he estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars a year in benefits are unclaimed.

The US spends almost as much as France on welfare, but this welfare — including tax credits and employer-sponsored health insurance — favours the rich too. Overall the US tax system is barely progressive: rich families pay an effective tax rate of 28 per cent, while poor and middle earners pay 25 per cent.

I would want to see more details on a lot of these claims. I am inclined to believe that a lot of aid money doesn't go where it's "supposed" to; public choice is powerful. But how do you solve that? And is it a problem elsewhere? I think it somewhat undermines the rest of the thesis: Americans are generous, but it's hard to support more of these programs if 80 cents of every dollar doesn't actually go to the poor. If your solution is "brute force this inefficiency by raising the tax rate to 70%" then yeah, that sounds like a terrible idea.

(For the record, we actually had many more tax breaks back when the top marginal rate was 90%--as far as I know, no one really paid anything like that rate, and federal revenue as a portion of GDP is constant since the end of WW2and uncorrelated with rates anyway).

The literature on the minimum wage is complicated and inconsistent. One comparison of 2 states isn't a lot. Where I live, the minimum wage was recently increased. But as far as I could tell, pretty much everywhere already paid more than the MW was. Starbucks, Walmart, fast food, supermarkets... I don't think I saw a single advertisement that wasn't at least a few percent above MW. A handful might have offered below the new minimum. But overall, I'm not surprised if you would see a negligible increase in unemployment. Of course, you would also see a negligible increase in wages. I think Scott's review of the minimum wage literature a while back came down on the side of "probably no negative effect" but most of the studies looked at small increases, because that's what governments tend to pass. Making the minimum wage 25$ an hour in a poor town is not something that, as far as I know, we have any data on.

As for comparing single parents across countries, well, why are they single parents? And how many of them are there? If you have 1 or 2 tragically single parents in a neighborhood, then the rest of the community helps out. If a quarter of the neighborhood is single parent homes, you overwhelm their resources and potentially contribute to overall disorder (something like this happened in government housing projects in Chicago that tried to only house families with a high number of children per parent). In the US, "single parent" is likely a strong correlate with e.g. some sort of criminal activity or substance abuse, while in other countries they might be more evenly distributed across classes because it's the result of amicable divorce, accidents, etc. (Actually, divorce seems like a strong candidate--IIRC from Coming Apart, the upper class has only become slightly more likely to divorce, while the lower class has become much more likely to do so, compared to the 60s, and I wonder if the same is true in those countries). Maybe the study found a way to control for all of this, which is why I would want to see it before making a judgement. But I believe there's relatively strong evidence from within the US showing that single parenthood has a detrimental effect on both the parent and child's future economic prospects.

Similarly the "effective tax rate" is something I'm skeptical of. How is it calculated? Most sources I'm aware of have the US has having one of the most progressive tax systems in the world; even if they're counting things like sales tax, most European countries rely heavily on consumption taxes like VA, which are more regressive than an income tax. I know some forms of investment and saving, particularly if you own your own home, get tax benefits; maybe that's where the difference comes from.

I'm somewhat confused as to how employer-sponsored health insurance is welfare. I agree that there's no reason why it should work this way; I believe it started during the wage freeze of WW2 but I'm not sure why it persists beyond "employers can get a good deal on price." But no other form of insurance works this way, so I assume something weird is still going on. Aren't there laws against selling insurance across state lines or something like that?

“What if I said, what’s crazy to me is that the country does so much more to subsidise affluence than it does to alleviate poverty.”

It's certainly the case that there's a lot of subsidies for the middle class and up. Everything from mortgage tax breaks to agricultural price supports and steel tariffs should be ejected at high speed, and social security at low speed. But as already discussed, attempting to tax more money to spend is unlikely to help--you can't actually do that (you would have to reduce spending elsewhere instead) and it would be horribly inefficient.

Things that I think would actually help:

  1. End the war on drugs. We spend a lot of money on police and prison, which could be redirected to medical solutions and other social services (or returned to people. "Tax people less and let them spend their charity where they think it works and also generally improve economic growth" is an alternative to anything I suggest spending money on in this list). I think single parenthood is likely to be bad, and imprisoning lots of young men from poor places doesn't help, plus it makes it harder for them to get real jobs in the future. On the flip side, aggressively police for real crimes like robbery, assault, etc.

  2. Overrule local zoning, parking minimums, and related ordinances that prevent reasonably affordable housing and dense, mixed-use development from being built. These massively drive up the cost of housing, which is a major expense, and often force everyone to have a car, which is also expensive. Invest in transit--surface light rail is probably cheaper per passenger-mile of capacity than a highway, even in the US.

  3. Repeal trade barriers, which make basic goods more expensive and cost more jobs than they save.

  4. Open up standard public education to competition from charter schools and, especially, trade schools. Traditional school has marginal benefit for the average poor student, especially since they are likely not to complete it, but a well-run school can help the smarter and more conscientious of them actually graduate and maybe even go to college. Trade schools provide an alternative to sitting in a useless class and working a dead-end job on the side for the rest.

Just wanted to say this is a legit AF post.

Please avoid low-effort "I agree!" posts.

The federal poverty rate — 11.6 per cent in 2021 — has been roughly flat since 1970.

I'm always very skeptical of these sorts of stats. "Federal poverty rate" is not an objective measure given to us by God or nature. That's a somewhat arbitrary and adjusted threshold.

Overall the US tax system is barely progressive

Okay, but, I've seen contrary assertions that America has the most progressive tax system. But I suppose that might just be Federal taxes and regressive state level sales taxes are skewing the results. Or maybe some people are lying or distorting how progressive our taxes are.

If you’re a worker without a college degree, you’re making less — inflation adjusted — in wages than you would have 40 years ago. How can we look at the American economy and still believe it’s an engine for broad prosperity?

As usual: at the end of WW2 much of Europe and Japan was bombed to rubble, the Chinese were coming out of decades of ruinous warfare, Taiwan and Korea were not that developed. In that special situation America was doing great. Being the major industrialized nation not bombed to hell enriched them. But these days we are one developed country among many. Our inflation adjusted prosperity shouldn't necessarily be expected to endlessly increase now that the rest of the world is catching up.

You want to run a lathe at work and raise a family in a decent house off of just that wage? Too bad, a Chinese guy does that job now. Your union costs too much to deal with. That Chinese guy will be punished if he agitates for a union. This set of facts do not contribute to increased inflation adjusted non-college wages.

I'm always very skeptical of these sorts of stats. "Federal poverty rate" is not an objective measure given to us by God or nature. That's a somewhat arbitrary and adjusted threshold.

It is, although it was decreasing for a long time before the 70s. I can only find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate,_1959_to_2017.png which only goes back to the late 50s, but I believe that it was steadily declining for decades before that, even through the Great Depression. I would guess what happened is that general economic and productivity growth brought everyone who is capable of consistently working full-time above the poverty line, and what's left is people with some other problem (mental illness, drugs, crime, broken family, or otherwise incapable of or unwilling to participate in normal society), but it is certainly convenient for my ideology that it bottomed out right when LBJ introduced the War on Poverty.

Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas.

Oh wow, a full 50 USD per apartment per month. Sounds like where practical difference vs. statistically significant difference might depart, if a statistically different result exists in the first place.

Landlords in poorer areas do experience greater variability in profits: some take large losses because their tenants default.

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? It's funny how the relationship between risk and reward is often rediscovered unwittingly.

All else equal, I would expect the return on investment for being a landlord for the poor to be greater than that for the return on being a landlord for the affluent. Greater reward for greater risk is expected.

Holding ROI constant, I'd greatly prefer being a landlord for the affluent than the not-so-affluent.

It's analogous to investing in general. A "good" company is not necessarily a good investment if you're looking for higher returns, given the relationship between risk and reward.

Furthermore, dealing with those on the lower end of the socioeconomic bell curve sucks, so there should be an additional premium above that of mere naive modeling of financial risk and reward.

Bougie Karen might harangue you about the angle of her towel rack installation, but at least her online autopay will go through and she'll otherwise be chill. Keranique, on the other hand, will be trying to hand you physical checks that will bounce, ditching her kids at your office for your staff to babysit, ditching her kids at your other tenants’ place to babysit, have friends and family over that wreck your property and disturb your other tenants, and will often have over babies daddies slash boyfriends that result in having the police being called, for reasons ranging from domestic violence to property damage to assaulting other residents.

Desmond documents how the poor are squeezed. There is a Clinton-era welfare programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In 2020, poor families received just 22 cents in every dollar it disbursed. The rest was used by states to pay for things such as job training and even abstinence-only sex education.

Let me not only steel man Desmond's argument, let me turn it into Level 30 Plasma Coated Super-Titanium and (hypothetically) admit all of his data, assertions, root cause analysis, and prescriptive recommendations are undeniably true. 100%, carved into the tablets true. Every voter in America skips hand-in-hand to the polls to demand action from our elected representatives.

And we redistribute all of American wealth with a 22% efficiency metric. Which means we're redistributing it to a horrible distribution.

It's difficult to overstate how bad the American government - specifically the executive branch with some gentle aid from the legislature - is at accomplishing its basic tasks. Talk to a veteran about interacting with the VA, Talk with a small business owner who wants to bid on simple government contracts for providing office supplies or hauling trash. Hell, talk to any of the Reservation folks Desmond grew up with about receiving mail on time.

Beyond any normative political values, beyond the constant back and forth with data and "studies," there is a fundamental problem that with a lot of the "reforms" of the 1970s, the U.S. Government got so incredibly bad at doing its job (this being a "job" that it legally outlaws other entities from doing).

Recently I've tried to stay away from the culture war topics just for my personal sanity. It is a part of me not trying to be 'Terminally Online' so I've even given up on using Reddit(killed my user after bulk deleting all my comments) too so I wasn't aware that they had an outage recently. So they posted a post-mortem of the outage. As it turns out it is a casualty of the Culture War.

The nodeSelector and peerSelector for the route reflectors target the label node-role.kubernetes.io/master. In the 1.20 series, Kubernetes changed its terminology from “master” to “control-plane.” And in 1.24, they removed references to “master,” even from running clusters. This is the cause of our outage. Kubernetes node labels.

The "master eradication activism" is the cause not Kubernetes node labels.

Recently I've tried to stay away from the culture war topics just for my personal sanity.

Rookie mistake. You will never maintain your sanity by running from the culture war because, as has happened to you, it will just follow you.

Well it is not driving me insane if I occasionally see things like this. I know how futile it is to argue with people that don't have to take the consequences of their activism that they aren't changing a word but an interface. It will have downstream consequences and possibly with bigger impact than knocking Reddit offline for a period. They are simply impervious for such arguments.

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? When you are terminally online and submerged into Culture War, you will perceive all Culture War related things more acutely.

Until some service you depend on goes down as a result of this crap. Or your employer and others in your industry start talking about how they're concentrating on hiring and promoting people who don't look like you. Or making you declare your pronouns. Or the grants you were applying for make it clear you don't have a chance unless you're in a minority group and doing work about that minority group. Or there's BLM riots in your city. Or the media you used to like for entertainment goes woke and is much less entertaining as a result.

The culture war is real, widespread, and has significant consequences.

"Imagine it's culture war and nobody goes there. Then the culture war will come to you!"

Lol I love this, super happy to hear about consequences from this ctrl+h stupidity. I built all the devops pipelines in my company and am so fucking ready for someone to tell me to rename the branches so they can fix every variable that references it across the enterprise.

On a side note, I hope you used a plugin to overwrite your comments with something else before deletion, I believe most scrapers and internal archives keep deleted comments.

On a side note, I hope you used a plugin to overwrite your comments with something else before deletion, I believe most scrapers and internal archives keep deleted comments.

I really don't care that there is a record still available. I just wanted to make it unavailable for myself so I don't get sucked back in. I tried to quit Reddit before but I ended up coming back, so I did the nuclear option of destroying all of it to have no reason to return. There is nothing in those comments that would come back and haunt me from an archive.

Control-plane is a terrible name.

At least 'main' communicates something. Control-plane reminds me of the old Euphimisms bit by Carlin. A word so neutered, that it loses all semantic value.

In kubernetes, the cluster nodes that run everything are already called the control plane, and have been for some time.

My point still stands, it is a terrible term. Up there with dynamic programming for phrases that do more to mislead than provide clarity.

I resent the lack of creativity in choosing new terms, more than I do the deprecation of old ones.

edit: I have been overruled. The limited yet overwhelming majority on here seems to find control_plane to be perfectly descriptive of its task. I won't concede on the terribleness of the term dynamic programming though.

Having worked with kubernetes for years now, I have never found the term unclear or misleading. To each their own I suppose.

they knew it would break people's setups but they did it anyway. https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/sig-cluster-lifecycle/kubeadm/2067-rename-master-label-taint/README.md one good thing about this linus philosophy of not breaking userspace is this happens less often. its very difficult not to break your users because they end up relying on behaviour you are not even aware of but breaking your users in order to fix 'offensive' naming seems to be a bad trade off.

No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.

I have occasionally thought that the Culture War is really just bike shedding at a much larger scale, with which this description seems to agree.

I think opening the floodgates of software developers to bootcampers hailing from non-technical backgrounds, and bereft of technical expertise, was a mistake. It is refocusing discourse in the profession away from technical discussions towards chatter of a religious, tribal nature.

I don't think it's bootcampers. Plenty of very-well-credentialed people argue for the elimination of "master" (and "whitelist/blacklist", and Lena, and all the other supposed bugaboos of computer science). Equally, plenty of people completely uncredentialed in computer science (who never went to a bootcamp, but are perhaps credentialed in some other field) attack these things. The bootcampers are more likely among those stuck cleaning up the mess.

I mostly agree with this description with a note that the largest exception I've seen is a complete lack of motion from universities and graduate degree holders to rename the masters degree. Even from institutions and people that I've seen replace the name elsewhere.

That's par for the course too though - changing masters degree would directly affect their social standing so it's a non starter, but anywhere else it's up for grabs.

This is beautiful. I was only just wondering whether there was anything resembling a religious take on programming, and "holistic" is close enough. Thanks!

You might like the Codeless Code

Surely Reddit were informed of this? Surely they updated kubernetes on an internal server.

I linked to their public post-mortem. Reddit is the den of scum and villainy alongside to Twitter when it comes to Social Justice Slacktivism. Chances on getting the company to publicly admit that the cause is an otiose language change that had a bigger impact on their lives than the actual change has on purported victims of that particular word, are nil, null, zilch, nada...

it comes to Social Justice Slacktivism

Is it still Slacktivism if they paid a substantial price due to the beliefs they advocated for?

It is Slacktivism because they gloss over the fact that they have suffered for their beliefs, that the replacement of words does something for inclusivity. It is reified in their existence. It is being treated as if it is a thing, but the reason for it is forgotten if it is not admitted why they do it. And thus the action has no reason to exist if it is a ritual without cause.

Well they did mention it. That’s how you know. It was buried in a long winded explanation.

I CTRL-F'd that post with the word "Master" to see how many people were talking about it, and only one person it seemed made a joke about how "so Reddit going woke was the cause of the outrage", but made sure to put a /S tag a the end of it...As one deleted replier put it, I mean, yeah wokeism literally broke reddit.

Can Conservatism assimilate the Dissident Right?

Recently Matt Walsh, conservative commentator from the Daily Wire, had a monologue on white identity that was basically word-for-word pulled from DR standard fare.

Conservatives have long used the "Democrats are the Real Racists" retort, which is an easy target for the DR to mock and differentiate itself from conservatism with a more radical viewpoint that has a stronger force of truth. Only very recently has "anti-white" migrated from DR to Conservative lexicon in its denunciations of progressivism. But this clip goes much further than both and does seem to indicate a sliding window on acceptable thought around race within the Conservative movement. It starts with rhetoric that you've probably heard from conservatives before, but it moves into territory that you do not see from conservatives, and this is clearly a scripted monologue rather than off-the-cuff comment. The end of the clip explains:

Black and brown can and should have a sense of racial identity, white must not- I mean that's the rule. It's why segregation can be promoted and instated as policy but only to give non-whites their special spaces, never to do the same for whites. Because to do the same would be to acknowledge the existence of white people as a group and to give that group permission to care about its own wellbeing.

The "Democrats are the Real Racists" (DR3) rhetoric is essentially a complaint of progressive hypocrisy in an effort to discredit progressive concern over racial issues and progressivism's own crypto race-essentialism which Hlynka equates with the DR.

Conservatism has traditionally used progressive hypocrisy on race in order to denounce progressive racial advocacy. The DR uses progressive hypocrisy over race to advocate for white identity. But I think Walsh's monologue here indicates a potential conservative assimilation of the DR position. It could be said that Walsh does not directly endorse white identity, but he describes it in positive terms that are exactly what you would read within the DR. His monologue here is clearly more in the DR ethos of using progressive framing of racial conflict in order to provide rational justification for white identity: "... Because to do the same would be to acknowledge the existence of white people as a group and to give that group permission to care about its own wellbeing" is essentially an endorsement of white identity rather than a typical conservative denunciation of racial identity altogether.

Particularly in the past 15 years, if you were a young conservative or libertarian or something and basically came to the conclusions of Matt Walsh without hearing those words ever be said by anyone in the conservative establishment, where would you gravitate to? The circles where you'll be handed Culture of Critique, circles where Nietzsche is looked to rather than John Locke or Milton Friedman, circles where WW-II and Holocaust Revisionism that would make a conservative faint is conventional wisdom.

It's possible, and potentially a threat to the DR, if Conservative Inc were able to assimilate an overtly pro-white platform into its rhetoric and ideology. One thing that is inseparable from identity, and is the primary reason why white identity has been taboo since the end of the war, is the friend and enemy distinction. If the Daily Wire for example were able to be the outlet for pro-white inclinations in the conservative movement, then it would also have much greater power in framing the friend and the enemy with the traditional shibboleths rather than losing those people to radicalization. Think of Rush Limbaugh, who could constantly lambast the Drive By Media and Hollywood to build credibility in order to ultimately keep everyone on the reservation.

It's not sustainable for the Conservative movement to completely ignore and denounce white identity. They have to acknowledge it eventually if they want to avoid being eclipsed by a more radical movement that offers that bundled with a lot more radical thinking. They do need to figure out how to assimilate white identity and advocacy with conservatism, and if they do that effectively then the DR is going to lose an important monopoly which has driven many to that sphere. Walsh's monologue here is an indication that this is likely going to happen.

The DR isn’t really a thing though outside of the ideas it sneaks into the mainstream. Unless Moldbug has a special forces dimes square project that I’m unaware of, there’s not much else it can/is willing to do to have any real influence.

This isn’t exactly what winning looks like. But it’s at least not loosing.

I don’t see DR and MR (Mainstream Right, I like the theme here btw) as oppositional. As someone who has been reading DR’s notes for a decade now, DRs have always loved when MRs started listening to their prognoses and advice. When Trump entered the scene, DRs rejoiced that he called attention to problems at the border and made implied comments on white identity. It’s often forgotten that the DR meme machine is what pushed Trump into the MR, implicitly coordinated around /pol/, Reddit, and Twitter. The “Real Enemy” (RNs) knew this, which is why they botswarmed /pol/ and deleted any plausible DR Reddit community while catastrophizing DRs and dis-uniting the Right, to prevent a repeat of the hype train. Whenever a MR comes closer to DR, DRs love it. Whenever MRS (mainstream right spaces) allow for more DR talk, DRs love it.

Part of this is that DRs have next to no real organizational capacity. They are more of an idea generator than a startup hub. (Side note: the fact that this isn’t a fair fight is lost on many DRs, who surprisingly cling to a lost moral code of actually trying to tell the truth. The mainstream does not think “how can I tell the truth about the DR”, neither do they think “what is the worst thing DR has said.” They think from consequent to antecedent, which is what we saw during the Jewish “day of hate hoax”, only utilizing truth when it enhances the potency of the propaganda. 99% of their focus is “what story or spectacle will persuade someone given what I know about the frailty of human psychology”, with the remaining 1% ensuring that they are not lying so obviously that their house of cards crumbles. DR’s are sitting there trying to tell people about the statistically correct FBI stats, correcting people who exaggerated them, and so forth, always being meticulous in data because they are mostly autistic and neurotic and analytical men. They have no skill in propaganda generation, by and large, and don’t even realize that they are supposed to do it.)

Side note: the fact that this isn’t a fair fight is lost on many DRs, who surprisingly cling to a lost moral code of actually trying to tell the truth.

I don't think this is a good characterisation of the DR position here. They aren't clinging to a moral code of trying to tell the truth - they perceive telling the truth as one of the weapons that are actually available to them. They can't rely on speaking power to truth as the MR/ML can, and their ideas actually have to stand on their own without the backing of the mainstream. "That person is lying to you for their own personal gain - here's the actual truth they don't want you to know" is a powerful opener for propaganda, especially when the person saying it is actually correct.

DRs have next to no real organizational capacity. They are more of an idea generator than a startup hub.

Technically true but I want to provide a bit more context. The reason that the DR has next to no real organizational capacity is that any DR organization which forms is immediately infiltrated, crushed and prosecuted by existing power structures. In many countries, forming a DR group is explicitly illegal, and in the vast majority of others it will get you immediately added to governmental watchlists.

DR’s are sitting there trying to tell people about the statistically correct FBI stats, correcting people who exaggerated them, and so forth, always being meticulous in data because they are mostly autistic and neurotic and analytical men. They have no skill in propaganda generation, by and large, and don’t even realize that they are supposed to do it.

This is the exact opposite of reality. The DR is the most effective propaganda outlet in the modern world - their memes and culture have completely colonised the gaming spaces occupied by the youth, their ideas shape popular conversations and their memes are so ubiquitous that they have in many cases become indistinguishable from regular internet culture. They can create ideas like the OK hand signal and milk being white supremacist dogwhistles and have the legacy media take them entirely seriously and broadcast their claims. They created "It's ok to be white", a scheme which caused a lot of nastier people on the left to drop the mask in a way that got a lot of normal people noticing. They don't just know that they're supposed to do it - they obsess over creating memes, "meming" things and repeatedly testing their ideas and messaging amongst themselves for maximum virality, creating entire internet subcultures devoted to spreading their ideas. They played such a large role in the election of Trump that a lot of forces on the left and MR immediately started attacking the major tech companies in order to do everything they could to make that collaboration less successful and less powerful - to say nothing of instances like the prosecution of Douglas Mackey.

They don't just know that they're supposed to do it

Or in other words, they're counting coup- Kiwifarms vs. Keffals and co. is how I'd expect that to look.

creating entire internet subcultures devoted to spreading their ideas

If it looks like a liberal and quacks like a liberal it's... probably a liberal. They're disproportionately dissident anyway when in a political situation that doesn't favor them- it's probably an evolutionary strategy to be sufficiently indispensable that the progressive-traditionalists can't fire them. These people just tend to create things because it's, for lack of a better word, in them to create; hacker culture used to be like this and, when you look at what the forefront is (used to be tech in general, but it's more limited to ML now), still very much is.

Once you figure out that traditionalists and progressives are just fighting over the temporary allegiances of these people- remember that, while the left can't meme, neither can the right (without the liberals)- political dynamics make more sense. It's just a pendulum; when dominated by traditionalists, play progressive, when dominated by progressives, play traditionalist.

Huh?

The whole reason for the existence of the MR is to marginalize and suppress the DR. If the MR is incapable of being a decisive political force and assuming power, as in the Weimar Republic for example, there's always the spectre of a DR takeover. The farthest the MR is willing to go is expropriating and repackaging some DR ideas like stricter border control etc. to the extent it's absolutely necessary to keep the DR politically marginalized. (Or so I've heard from some liberal normies, as an accusation.)

The main difference between the MR and the DR is the racial narrative, so they can probably be expected to merge if DR race narrative goes mainstream.

If the racial narrative really were to go mainstream it seems to me that the far more likely outcome is that the "Dissident-Right" ends getting reabsorbed into the mainstream democratic party as the two parties return to their historical roles with the Democrats being the party of "racial discrimination is good and constitutional" vs the Republicans as the party of "we hold these truths to be self-evident."

They don't need to "reconcile" just recognize eachother as allies of convenience like baptists and bootleggers. If Group A wants discrimination based on race to be legal, Group B wants discrimination based on race to be legal, and Group C wants it to be illegal, there will be pressure for groups A and B to vote together.

the two parties return to their historical roles with the Democrats being the party of "racial discrimination is good and constitutional" vs the Republicans as the party of "we hold these truths to be self-evident."

Oh absolutely, only this time the Dems will be supporting discrimination against whites.

DR, in general, is also not very hot on things like democracy and female franchise, meanwhile, the MR seemingly worships it and idolises women.

This makes them less tactful but not very different from hardliner social conservatives, who have a definite place in the mainstream right.

It's not just up to Conservatives, or even the "dissident right".

If the country supports legal discrimination against a group, it has no choice but to organize politically along that group line.

The politics don't matter, the issues don't matter, all that matters is who gets to denigrate who, and the who getting denigrated has to band together and become single-issue voters to be able to survive. So long as the left is the anti-white party, the right will have to be by default the "white party". Surely those who talk so much about "structures" should be able to see the obvious conflict.

What do you actually hope to get from a right that embraces white identity? I understand that DR often think mainstream conservatives just dont take anti-white progressives seriously enough, but if e.g. Rufo just maximally succeded, what do you think would be missing?

What do you actually hope to get from a right that embraces white identity?

It's simple- look at the political and cultural power other ethnic groups enjoy by organizing along ethnic lines and fiercely advocating for their group. That's what I want. Why? Because it's necessary, and without it you just lose. You only really need to open your eyes to see all that power that comes with organizing around ethnic and racial identity, it shouldn't be a mystery so to why I would want white people to embrace that. It's very powerful, I don't want a state of affairs where this behavior is taboo for white people but encouraged for people who are hostile to white people.

It may be powerful, but is it a power which results in a stronger, healthier, and better nation?

I personally much prefer a nation which organizes along a shared ethic, not ethnic line.

I think the response from people who agree with SecureSignals would be that you have to work with the situation you have. Using the same tactics as your opponent is defect-defect, but better than defect-cooperate where you cooperate.

I personally much prefer a nation which organizes along a shared ethic, not ethnic line.

The two may not be separable, at least not sustainably so. Large multiethnic states in history were run autocratically and left cultural enclaves alone within reason. Enforcing and maintaining an ethical union over diverse peoples, as the late Roman or Russians discovered, is a divisive and purge-filled affair that possibly leads to your state shattering into a million little pieces. Some believed liberalism was the master-ethic to would coordinate a state with multiple ethnicities. And yet it's only really worked in quite homogenous countries, with the possible, interesting exception of India. You introduce liberalism to country with tribes, and democracy become a mechanism for tribal looting.

Visible ethnic diversity in the USA has been increasing. What do we see? Reparations and DEI (looting) and an increasing number of people fracturing ideologically. How's our ethical union going?

Either (a) Hispanics and Asians dissolve with the American "whites" like Italians and Germans did with the WASPs, forming a spliced ethnicity where no one really knows what tribe they belong to — "I'm 50% English, 30% French, 15% Irish, 5% German" — or (b) the whole thing is going to segfault.

It's very powerful, I don't want a state of affairs where this behavior is taboo for the labor class but encouraged for people who are hostile to the labor class.

Yes, I absolutely think this power ends up ruining any nation over time. The selfishness of the Labor class might be bad news, but at least that selfishness is productive; the selfishness of the Capital class is zero-sum and is only ever destructive.

Traditionally, it's only kept in check by sufficiently powerful cultural competitors (who need the average man to defend them lest they be led away in chains), but those competitors no longer exist. And there's scarce few ways to break out of it compared to 100 years ago given significant economic opportunities have allowed to be enclosed by capital.

Racial animus in the US is downstream of class animus (capital vs. labor). This is why the capital class needs racial animus running interference.

It's simple- look at the political and cultural power other ethnic groups enjoy by organizing along ethnic lines and fiercely advocating for their group.

I think in the modern context this success is almost entirely down to the authorities humoring them. US blacks are not such a threat that the government has to make all these concessions to them, they could absolutely turn it off if they wanted to. China does that sort of thing all the time. The "concessions" are things the elites already wanted to do. I mean, a lot of those organisations doing the "fierce advocacy" arent even run by black people. Their ethnic power is a kayfabe for progressives.

You have it backwards- progressivism is a kayfabe for ethnic power, and always has been, from the moment it emerged from Universities. That's what the DR is conscious of. You are describing a sort of bio-leninism that is also consistent with that conclusion where, sure, blacks could be disenfranchised at the drop of a hat if that were desired. But it isn't. What is desired is their allegiance with a façade of "inclusion and equity" that masks what is in actuality ethnic hostility.

When the ADL puts enormous pressure at the highest levels of power to "Stop Hate", is that progressivism masquerading as ethnic power, or is it ethnic power masquerading as progressive morality?

When the ADL puts enormous pressure at the highest levels of power to "Stop Hate", is that progressivism masquerading as ethnic power, or is it ethnic power masquerading as progressive morality?

But I think you will agree that the ADL didnt get its power from "fierce advocacy". The advocacy and the being-persuaded-by-it are fake. My point is that "doing identity politics" suggests a pretty specific plan of action: You want to be very loud about how your group is treated badly, maybe have an organisation dedicated to that, make an ethnic voting block, etc. But those parts are kayfabe, they dont actually make you win. Now, maybe you mean something else by it, but if so its pretty prone to misunderstandings, because I still cant tell what it would be after rereading your comments with the assumption that its there.

I think the more pertinent question is should we want to?

What do the woke-contrarians/dissident-right bring have to offer that's worth the risk of lowering our memetic defenses to bring them in?

Reading this instantly made me think of Clausewitz: either you believe your position to be an advancing one or you're banking on future provenance alone. The presumption is that the faltering side seeks to bring in new allies.

Who's faltering though? From the perspective of the mainstream right its the left that's on the backfoot. For the last 8 - 10 years we have been winning on gun control, winning on abortion, winning on school choice/religious freedom. Our claims about the covid lockdowns and the perfidity of the technocratic class are in the process of being vidicated. And while the battles over immigration and the trans issue continue they but remain undecided.

When rationalists complain about the "crisis in sense making" what they're really noticing is that the ability of progressive gate keepers in academia and the media to project power has been crushed, thier credibility eliminated. They dont know what to make of a world where claims of superior intelligence and education are met with a disdain rather than deference

Contrary to users like @SecureSignals and @The_Nybbler I do not see the progressive movement's rising aggression and shrillness as evidence of strength, just the opposite infact, i see it as a product of evaporative cooling. They were supposed to have already won, and the fact that not only have they not won but that they are slowly getting pushed back on several fronts is making the "true believers" among them desperate.

For the last 8 - 10 years we have been winning on gun control

LOL. In red states, you've got constitutional carry; that at least is real. In blue states there used to be "no carry" or "may issue".... and now there's carry permits that have so many carveouts that you can't actually carry, and anyway there's a super-long backlog to apply. Not to mention in blue states there are still permits to purchase which are hard to get. Some "right to keep and bear arms"! On the Federal level there are still import bans, machine guns remain banned, suppressors remain difficult to obtain legally, there's the new bump stock ban, the new pistol brace ban, there remains the ban on interstate transfer of firearms. There's red flag laws passed at state levels (and including red states) and encouraged by the Biden administration. There's bans which can be triggered by an ex parte restraining order, bans which apply to "domestic violence misdemeanors" (ex post facto of course), etc.

That's not winning. That's a mixed result. It only looks like winning because of the rout in so many other areas.

When rationalists complain about the "crisis in sense making" what they're really noticing is that the ability of progressive gate keepers in academia and the media to project power has been crushed, thier credibility eliminated.

Not so. COVID proved otherwise. People may say they don't trust the media or whoever, but they'll fall right in line with whatever the gatekeepers say anyway.

Who's faltering though? From the perspective of the mainstream right its the left that's on the backfoot.

I want you to be right. I can even see a few fronts where the tide seems to be turning, but I think you're going a bit far with your triumphalism. They only seem on the backfoot relative to the speed at which they've been making gains.

For the last 8 - 10 years we have been winning on gun control

I'll defer to your expertise, but is it actually easier to get a gun than it was 8-10 years ago?

winning on abortion

Granted.

winning on school choice/religious freedom.

Teachers/students at religious schools are being fired/suspended for not following tenets of progressive ideology that directly contradict their religion. If you suggested that 10 years ago people would call that slippery slope, or an uncharitable strawman.

Our claims about the damage of covid lockdows and the perfidity of the technocrats class have been vidicated.

Yes, but no one but you/us cares.

Meanwhile the battles over immigration and the trans issue are continue but remain from decided.

Funny, the trans issue is where I see the tide turning.

When rationalists complain about the "crisis in sense making" what they're really noticing is that the ability of progressive gate keepers in academia and the media to project power has been crushed

We just got out of a worldwide lockdown they decided to impose. It's possible they won't be able to do something like that again soon, but a reprieve from the greatest show of force that I can remember is not what I'd call getting crushed.

thier credibility eliminated.

"Eliminated" might be too strong a word, but mostly granted. Even the Klaus Schwab Gang is whinging about it.

They were supposed to have already won, and the fact that not only have they not won but that they are slowly getting pushed back on several fronts is making them desperate.

There's truth to that. In fact, people like SecureSignals, The_Nybbler, and me might have our characters tested soon. I have a feeling that, if you're right, the powers that be might put away Wokeness and start pandering to people like us again, and we'll have to show if we learned anything from all this.

An answer to the woke that's not "Let's keep retreating and maybe eventually they'll be satisfied".

There are other answers that do the same though.

I haven't seen one. Actual equality under the law doesn't work; the woke side will always win by demonstrating blacks are worse off and playing on sense of justice and sympathy to demand preferential treatment.

There's a great deal more that conservatives could try doing before they resort to "actually, we need to think about ourselves as White people". They seem reluctant to stoop to the tactics of their enemies, but if they did, I don't think it's obvious they would still lose.

"Actually, we need to think about ourselves as White people" IS stooping to the tactics of their enemies.

Right, I should clarify. When I say tactics, I mean that which is roughly agnostic of ideology. Conservatives could, for example, ban that which they dislike without changing what they believe. For example, the New College thing in Florida where they put aligned people on the board of a progressive college. There has been long discussion about the "Long March on the Institutions", this is just a more blatant version of that.

Building race-aligned coalitions is also tactics. The New College thing is going nowhere anyway; the left knows all about the long march and they're not going to let it happen to them.

More comments

What do the woke-contrarians/dissident-right bring have to offer that's worth the risk of lowering our memetic defenses to bring them in?

It's like you're saying "The gates will hold!" when the enemy is already breaching the keep. What memetic defenses do you speak of? It's clear that white people have no memetic defenses against the organized group behavior of others. That's the entire point.

The DR provides an evolutionarily-proven strategy for establishing memetic defenses.

evolutionarily-proven

White Identitarianism seems to have failed in all prior cases.

I despair reading this. But the antidote to White identity - and woke identity - is likely Christian universalism. Hell (so to speak), even Muslims are not hung up on race, save for the Black Muslim heretics, an American phenomenon. They too are a colorblind universalist doctrine.

Universalism, Christian or otherwise, fails against racial identity. As long as blacks hold to their racial identity, whites will be at a disadvantage holding to universalism. That's what the rise of "woke" (which was, after all, a term from the African American grievance community) demonstrates.

But not adhering to racial identity allows you to partner with others. Racial particularists wall themselves off from that possibility.

The non-white coalition sticks together just fine. Usually, anyway.

even Muslims are not hung up on race,

I've heard different claims - that e.g. Arabs look down on Turks, Malay and Indonesian Muslims and non-Arabic speakers in general, despite objectively speaking those latter groups are seen as more sympathetic and seem to be doing better on most metrics.

It's not sustainable for the Conservative movement to completely ignore and denounce white identity. They have to acknowledge it eventually if they want to avoid being eclipsed by a more radical movement that offers that bundled with a lot more radical thinking.

You're totally right when you say that it isn't sustainable for the Conservative moment to completely ignore and denounce white identity. Failure to integrate those perspectives and deal with the sources of pain and frustration that fuel them is going to be the end of the Conservative movement.

They do need to figure out how to assimilate white identity and advocacy with conservatism, and if they do that effectively then the DR is going to lose an important monopoly which has driven many to that sphere. Walsh's monologue here is an indication that this is likely going to happen.

But this is where your statement goes wrong - they are not going to effectively do that because their entire raison d'être is to make sure that the DR does not gain power and their ideas remain at the fringes of political discourse. The conservative moment will only change when the human infrastructure of the movement's nervous system is ripped out and replaced with people who are at the very least DR sympathetic.


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats