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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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I was reading this article about Amazon Prime's streaming service:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/inside-amazon-studios-jen-salke-vision-shows-1235364913/

Mostly it's not particularly culture war related, talking about how the executives are blowing huge amounts of money on niche shows that don't bring in enough viewers to justify their costs, or paying big salaries to writers and directors that don't end up producing much.

But this part made me chuckle:

Another complaint is that Sanders relies heavily on feedback from focus groups, which tend to favor broad and less inclusive programming. Several Amazon insiders say the reliance on testing and data led to a clash late last summer, when an Amazon executive said in a marketing meeting for the series A League of Their Own that data showed audiences found queer stories off-putting and suggested downplaying those themes in materials promoting the show. Series co-creator Will Graham became greatly concerned about bias built into Amazon’s system for evaluating shows, which multiple sources say often ranked broad series featuring straight, white male leads above all others. One executive calls A League of Their Own “a proxy for how diverse and inclusive shows are treated.”

Graham launched into an interrogation of the system, questioning multiple executives about it. Amazon took the issue seriously and dropped the system of ranking shows based on audience scores. Insiders cite this show as one that Sanders did passionately support, but for months after it dropped, there was no word on whether it would be renewed. Ultimately, Amazon agreed to a four-episode second and final season. Still, several Amazon veterans believe the system remains too dependent on those same test scores. “All this perpetuation of white guys with guns — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says one. And another: “Relying on data is soul crushing … There’s never, ‘I know the testing wasn’t that great, but I believe in this.'” Graham declined to comment.

I've seen people argue that big companies aren't ideologically woke, they're just doing it for good publicity with the ultimate goal of making money. I think if that was true then Amazon would tell their producers and directors to make the type of content that people want to see: white men with guns (apparently). And if they didn't want to get on board they should take a hike. That's what a company that wants to make money would do. Instead they're trying to change their audience's preferences which is a much harder and less profitable job.

Graham launched into an interrogation of the system, questioning multiple executives about it. Amazon took the issue seriously and dropped the system of ranking shows based on audience scores… Still, several Amazon veterans believe the system remains too dependent on those same test scores. “All this perpetuation of white guys with guns — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says one. And another: “Relying on data is soul crushing … There’s never, ‘I know the testing wasn’t that great, but I believe in this.'” Graham declined to comment.

Am I out of touch? No, it's the audience who are wrong.

The principal-agent problem allows executives and middle managers to express their open hatred for white men through corporate operations, hiring, and promotions at little to no personal cost. Even personal gain. And there’s nothing anyone else can do to stop them.

It’s funny how normalised this all is nowadays.

This reminds me of Iger’s recent complaints about Trump. Iger basically said “Disney exercised its first amendment rights over an issue and DeSantis attacked it.” Iger is probably right on the specifics, but there is a big problem in what Iger said.

Investors didn’t give Disney a bunch of money to make political statements about issues far from Disney’s core business. While Delaware courts have wisely limited their review of what is ultra vires, as a pragmatic issue what Disney did was in fact ultra vires. That means in a real sense Disney executives used other people’s money to say things Disney executives wanted to say. Indeed it didn’t seem to occur to Iger that making political statements unrelated to core Disney business was morally dubious. The fish doesn’t understand water.

But there is a word for what Disney did — stealing. Principal-agent problem is a more fancy specific term but that essentially theft is what P-A problem is.

Disney is a media empire with a very carefully curated public image critical to their business operations.

If they believed their silence on a political matter in the state they are massively associated with would adversely affect their brand, or the productivity of their 200k+ employees, it would be negligent of them to do nothing.

While you can disagree about how they addressed it, it was well in scope of their business.

No one is saying they can’t as a legal matter do what they did.

But taking a strong political position relating to what k-3 kindergartners are taught relating to sexuality in Florida is so far removed from any effect on their brand or workforce that de facto it is ultra vires. If doing that isn’t ultra vires, then nothing is ultra vires as everything can affect brand or workforce.

But maybe you are right. Maybe in our culture where everything is political the company was merely engaging in business practice. That speaks very I’ll of our society.

That reasoning proves too much. By your logic, nothing whatsoever is ever out of scope of someone's business, because it might possibly affect their reputation.

Series co-creator Will Graham became greatly concerned about bias built into Amazon’s system for evaluating shows, which multiple sources say often ranked broad series featuring straight, white male leads above all others.

...

Still, several Amazon veterans believe the system remains too dependent on those same test scores. “All this perpetuation of white guys with guns — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says one. And another: “Relying on data is soul crushing … There’s never, ‘I know the testing wasn’t that great, but I believe in this.'” Graham declined to comment.

As someone who grew up in an environment where third wave feminism was just taken for granted as the obviously correct thing (well, really 2.5th wave, I suppose, and it was just called "feminism"), I'm reminded of the basic attitude that I noticed there, which I'd sum it up as "feminism can't fail, it can only be failed." I've noticed this sort of attitude being a very strong feature of the downstream cluster of ideologies that have followed since, i.e. "identity politics," "SJW," "woke." There's this strong and constantly reinforced idea that we know that our ideology is the obviously correct one that we only need to present to others whose sole correct response is to agree and submit. Any sort of pushback is necessarily a failure on the part of those pushing back, reflecting their bigotry/stupidity which we have no responsibility to account for. This is the core of a lot of the very popular and influential memes in this space like "sit down and shut up," "white fragility," or "tone policing."

But when you're making products for a business, you run into the issue of actually having to appeal to potential customers so that they give you their money for the product. I think the principal-agent problem is certainly at play here, where the decision makers are motivated to push the kind of media they believe ought to be produced, regardless of their profitability. And if the audience doesn't reward them with their money, then so be it; these people are stupid bigots, and even if our company fails, at least we were morally righteous along the way.

But the reality of the market is that without that income, you eventually run out of people willing to fund your videos. This can take a long time, but most people still understand that it's unlikely to go on forever, which I think leads to a couple of different strategies. One is to use the same bullying tactics referenced above in sociopolitical situations, to try to shame the audience into giving them their money. I believe Amazon's Rings of Power's marketing had some of this with the emphasis on the diverse cast and accusations that believing that the racial diversity of some of the isolated population groups would take away from the immersion was bigotry. And more broadly, it's been a popular tactic in the industry with the creators of films like Bros, the Charlie's Angels reboot, and Terminator: Dark Fate outright saying that supporting their films was what good open-minded people would do. This tactic has worked extremely well in sociopolitical contexts where social or outright coercion are options, but I think in media it has had very little success at all.

The other strategy I see, a much more long-term one, is emphasizing socialism or some similar variant of anti-capitalism as the obviously correct way to move society towards. The idea being that without capitalism, video producers would be free to create whatever without constraints based on the audience and as such the media landscape would be more full of the morally correct kind of media, which would then help to reinforce the morally correct sort of sociopolitical views in society. Whether or not this kind of scenario is realistic, I think many people truly believe it, and that's why someone like, say, Anita Sarkeesian, one of the most famous and influential 3rd wave feminists in media in the past decade, has openly come out against capitalism.

Adding to that, I suspect artists have always been upset at the requirement that their projects be profitable, and when you combine that with woke ideology holding itself out as more important than profits, the results are truly big.

I avoided seeing Disney’s Moana in theaters because all the marketing was “wow brown gurl much diversity so hype”

When I finally did watch it, I enjoyed it. The glam crab was the only near-woke thing, and that segment was clearly over-the-top and based on the voice actor, and thus fun. The rest was a real treat, and The Rock’s “You’re Welcome” is one of the greatest Disney songs of all time.

I had a very similar experience with Moana myself. And I remember a friend at the time bitching that the movie didn't do very well, despite being super feminist etc etc. And I just wanted to shake him and say yeah, that's because people made the idiotic decision to try to sell the movie based on how feminist it was rather than trying to highlight that it was just a nice story told well.

feedback from focus groups, which tend to favor broad and less inclusive programming.

I feel like I just had a stroke, because if something truly is "inclusive", shouldn't it have broad appeal?

I know, of course, that this is the newspeak progressive definition of "inclusive", which means "alienating to the majority", much like "diverse" just means "less white people."

But I'm really beginning to feel like we all owe an apology to all those people we derided as deranged racists for saying as such back on the internet of yore. "Anti-racist is code for anti-white" ended up being 1000% true.

Graham launched into an interrogation of the system, questioning multiple executives about it.

It's horrifying to think that there are really people who think "If the fact finding process isn't giving me the answers I want, it should be changed until it does."

Anti-racist is code for anti-white" ended up being 1000% true.

Their issue is that they were too broad minded, it isn't anti-white, it is anti-social.

It is a continual issue I have with such types, caught up in broad strokes rather than drilling down into the issue.

It pretty much explicitly is anti-white. It might also as a byproduct be anti-social, but that's by the by as far as I'm concerned. The motivating factor is a general hatred of whites. Many activists do not even bother to hide it.

I read the article and found it all amusing. I'm all for auteur-driven storytelling, but it seems at Amazon they want it both ways - they want their shows about niche interests to have massive budgets and be tentpole hits. This queer baseball comedy cost >$10 million per episode to make; that's blockbuster TV territory, not what you pay for a single creative vision.

I'm no fan of The Big Bang Theory, but if you actually want a show to hit that kind of viewership yeah, maybe you do need to play to the common man. And if not maybe you need a way to control costs. Amazon seems to want to have the prestige of HBO, and thinks that spending a couple billion dollars oughta do it. But HBO didn't become HBO through financial largesse. They had a very deliberate vision of what they wanted to be.

Another Amazon tradition: Only top executives have offices. Until this year, other high-level execs have worked in assigned cubicles. Since January, however, the vast majority have to contend with “agile seating,” meaning they work at unassigned cubbies in designated “neighborhoods,” and are provided with lockers for their belongings.

What's the point of being an executive if you don't even have your own office? Sounds like an unpleasant company to work in.

A boring dystopia.

I enjoy how “hotdesking” has already been rebranded as “agile seating” because it’s so widely despised. The euphemism treadmill strikes again.

Thanks to hotdesking and hotwifing, I’ve been conditioned to automatically hate anything that starts with a “hot” and ends with a “-ing.”

I like the way you’re hottaking here.

His face is positively spattered with hottake.

Hotboxing isn't great either.

Never hotload your missiles or hotswap your hard drives.

Wait'll you try hotsheeting...

It is unpleasant. On the other hand cubicles are unpleasant for everybody and this saves Bezos money. Yachts are not cheap.

I also think that there is something more here. For instance after ideological 60ties and crushing/burning 70s came 80ies with their yuppie culture. These were free market hedonistic know-it-all youth, often in love with Ayn Rand and similar radical thought. Even then this was not the culture that would be predominant in the general population, but this was something in the air.

Similarly I think that wokism today has its function inside corporate governance structures. It provides executives with convenient moral cover for various things they want to do and it offers huge toolset to narcissists and psychopaths inside the organization. Remember, today's wokeness is often viewed as a successful turn where former radicals marched through institutions such as law, education, media but also government administration. There is rich tradition such as that from Dwight Waldo preaching that there is no "value-free" governance and thus we should adopt governance that promotes equity.

Again, I think that the mistake here is to evaluate wokeness in its own idealistic terms, or maybe in terms of alternative structures. I think wokeness should be evaluated in its own practical terms of its inevitable end state, which would look more like Chinese state today. Everything is political, everything is argued for as implementation of one noble government goal or another. But bellow the surface you have vicious struggle of elites for power inside beurocracy where identifying where the wind blows from is crucial for commercial success. For politically well connected CEO, it is easier to squash competitors by making sure they have low ESG score by taping ones social network as opposed to market competition. It does not matter if population wants or does not want ESG, what matters is what elites want and how they compete for power. Similarly in China it does not matter if you provide service that people want, as soon as you are not protected politically, you end up like Jack Ma.

I think wokeness should be evaluated in its own practical terms of its inevitable end state, which would look more like Chinese state today.

Yes, that's called "corruption", the natural consequence of technological stagnation such that the multiplicative effects that should come from serving the population's needs and driving it forward are outweighed by any other factor (in China, this is complicated by raw population making any gains sufficiently seizable and replaceable; in the US, it's... other things).

When the woke say that more economically equal societies form a type of bulwark against this kind of corruption, they're right (and trivially so); it's just that literally everything they do is designed to create an unequal society that uniquely privileges that corruption with appeals to morality as its cover- and that should be predictable behavior from the more corrupt part of that society bifurcating into high and low because the ways to be middle (and thus having to compete on positive-sum merit rather than a zero-sum purity corruption spiral) have been enclosed or obsoleted.

The problem with the US is that, in its 250 year run, it's only ever had to deal with this once, and that was after the mass industrialization centered around 1900. If you think "citizen perceived stability and prosperity" has anything to deal with TFR, you'll notice that by 1920 TFR was down barely above replacement in a country that was still 50% agrarian (so if the rural areas were still averaging 3 kids, that means the urban areas were down to South Korean TFR).

Now, to be fair to the American public, the then-unnecessariat would get a massive amount of concession from Roosevelt in the 1930s, but those reforms were for a different time, in a different place, under different economic conditions- what needs to be tackled now is the corruption inherent in free-trade laws (that are, from a macroeconomic standpoint, indistinguishable from the legalization of slavery; the fact that you're allowed to violate American worker rights laws so long as those crimes aren't committed on shore has not gone unnoticed by the now-unnecessariat).

Interestingly enough, "massive influx of slave labor" is arguably the thing that destroyed the Roman Republic- slave labor from conquests pushed everyone into the city, and Caesar was able to take advantage of it before it died out. I could believe an argument that the current socioeconomic policies of the US are designed to stretch the tail of this population out and dilute it enough there won't be enough support for a Caesar- but this is probably just a convenient side-effect, and events could still transpire that makes him a reality (for instance, if AI shrinks the pie more).

I think if that was true then Amazon would tell their producers and directors to make the type of content that people want to see: white men with guns (apparently).

Any executive in that position knows what would happen if they did that. Maybe it would sell more for a bit, but then the vocal minority would start loudly complaining, and claiming Amazon is white supremacist, and this executive would have to answer for it.

Having a job at a place like Amazon makes you a different person, wherein you must constantly portray yourself as squeaky clean. I frequently find myself acting like a very different person at work than I actually am, and operating contrary to my own values. The most important thing is avoiding controversy from both inside and especially from outside the company. This always makes me think about egregores, and how within the company it's possible that absolutely everyone is operating against their own interest, because the entity of the company "demands it" in some way.

Isn't this just a case of individual decision makers having more to gain from impressing and staying on good terms with their peers than maximizing profits? Maybe that's not in the best interest of Amazon, but 'Amazon' doesn't make decisions.

You're half way there. If Hollywood started obsessively inserting Scientology into movies (which would then proceed to reliably bomb), would we be wondering whether it's the profit motive and individuals trying to impress each other, or would we just say "wow, looks like Scientologists really expanded in recent years"?

What I find funny is it's almost certainly the "action" part of that formula that provides 90% of the appeal. I think that writers rooms are way to the left of the median American on values. The median American is still basically heterosexual, pro-family, pro-achievement, pro-justice, and generally in alignment with what we might call Western virtues, which cash out by starting as Aristotle described - courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, ambition, patience, friendliness, truthfulness, wit, modesty, and justice - and probably add some Nietzchean virtues on top of that: health, strength, and a will to power.

Make your show about a protagonist of any color that strives to achieve those virtues and you have a pretty solid foundation. What people are mostly not enjoying are shows that attack these virtues or celebrate vice. People do not enjoy the anti-social, the self-destructive, the celebration of weakness or bitterness or mediocrity. They generally don't sympathize with losers and incompetence.

I think this also explains the perennial unpopularity of Christian media even during periods when the vast majority of people consider themselves Christians. For many, their Christianity is a moral counterweight to the ancient virtues they actually implicitly believe in.

What I find funny is it's almost certainly the "action" part of that formula that provides 90% of the appeal.

Yes, but the showrunners are mostly constitutionally incapable of doing an action show with "diverse" characters that doesn't try to shove the diversity in your face. And it's harder to do with female, homosexual or trans characters than with race because that sort of action is part of the formula also.

I've certainly noticed that "woke" pieces of media that have action in them tend to be mediocre at best in terms of the action, though I never connected it to the idea that action films/TV shows implicitly have that sort of right-wing philosophical worldview. What stood out to me mostly was just how awful and disconnected from reality the choreography tends to be, with fights not showing the basic intent that's present in each and every blow that's thrown, or with physics breaking suspension of disbelief far beyond what's expected of an action film. Amazon's own Rings of Power which famously easily had enough of a budget to film top quality fight scenes, suffered from this according to clips I saw, and so did The Matrix: Resurrections and even the older arguably minimally "woke" film Wonder Woman. I just figured that if the creators considered the messaging a priority, they let other aspects falter such as hiring someone who understands how to put together a good action scene, but now I also wonder if there's some sort of subconscious distaste for action scenes that caused an intentional sabotage of those scenes.

I think the explanation is a little more prosaic. Explicitly Woke and explicitly Christian both tend to suffer from the same defect as any ideological fiction: being sanctimonious and preachy, with quality taking a back seat to message. This means the finished product tends to not be very good and unlike more subtly written material it is hard to get past themes you don't like (or, indeed, achieve basic audience buy-in to begin with).

There's also probably an argument that the association flows backwards - if something is good, we downplay its ideological content. Stuff like Ben-Hur and Prince of Egypt are pretty well regarded.

But their “white male action” shows are equally bad.

Certainly not, at least not the first season. "Reacher" was great. The first season of "The Boys" was really good.

I've also heard good things about Terminal List and the last season of Jack Ryan.

The last season of Jack Ryan was laughably bad.

Standard Hollywood writing where supposedly brilliant characters make completely stupid decisions to advance the plot. Confusion on which countries are NATO members or border Russia. Spec ops dudes travel undetected from the Black Sea to west of Athens in a zodiac.

They’ve also murdered the character of Jack Ryan. He’s no longer a Catholic with a wife and kids, but a rather amoral man with no apparent interest in women beyond casual sex. Book Jack Ryan would end a fight if he found himself in one, but wouldn’t use violence as his first option, typically coming up with some trickery to avoid it. Show Jack Ryan shoots a lot of people as an expected consequence of his uncreative plans.

Yeah. Show Jack Ryan seems to have no arc or development. This is a character who is supposed to be on the trajectory to be selected as a presidential running mate (and eventually be elevated to president). Instead we have a cavalier man-child who conspires with Russians on dubious evidence.

Their show about Zelda Fitzgerald was also really good. They cancelled it after one season though.

They actually renewed it and then spent 5 million dollars on pre-production of the second season and then cancelled it. I mean it's not HBOmax renewing Minx and filming the entire second season and then cancelling it but it's clearly an executive decision-making problem. I wouldn't call any show that they've ever made an organic "hit" besides The Boys.

If you look at the Nielsen weeklies of time watched and compare A League of Their Own to Reacher it's probable that the entirety of minutes watched up until for for A League of Their Own was probably equal to the first couple weeks of Reacher. And Reacher is a mild hit for Amazon and Amazon in general has a much lower bar for being a hit than Netflix.

For a comparison Reacher had around 1500 million minutes watched in its first week and A League of the Their Own had around 500 million minutes. Reacher stayed on the charts for a couple more weeks but League was gone after its initial appearance.

Another, more sad comparison is that Friends/Seinfield/The Big Bang Theory/Gilmore Girls/Supernatural routinely get around 500 million minutes weekly, they pop in and out of the top ten but they're pretty consistent and usually come back. For whatever reason the show failed spectacularly but nobody noticed because nobody probably knew it existed (a wonder how that works).

Though all of this is moot. A League of Their Own is a clout chasing prestige show made to show off diversity or be artistic and maybe nab awards. It's competition is never going to be Reacher or Jack Ryan but maybe something like the Night Sky which premiered even lower than League and was promptly cancelled. It seems pretty clear that Amazon, like every other network and streamer makes a few clout/award shows and doesn't stick with them if they're not successful.

The fact that they're getting a second season and complaining about it is just a stupid way to bite the hand that feeds. Aside from writing for the Onion, and Movie 43 Will Graham has two episodes on a sitcom for Bravo which I'd never heard of and wasn't aware that Bravo made sitcoms, and his other two shows were both Amazon shows. The guy wrote for the Amazon show Alpha House, executive produced and wrote for Mozart in the Jungle and then created and wrote for A League of Their Own. And then he shits on Amazon, I hope that shield of saying "diversity" can keep them from noticing/remembering this when they want to offer him another show to make. It's funny how it's the white guy complaining about this and the other creator who has a career outside of that show isn't instigating diversity investigations into Amazon because her show was only renewed for a second and final season.

Jack Reacher was fairly good, I thought. Not woke at all, and pretty good action.

Yeah acting and plotting was decent, the dialogue was refreshingly... not braindead? Can't say the same for the terminal list.

The part that I don't quite understand is why Phoebe Waller-Bridge, an English feminist? comedian, is being asked to star in and produce action shows. She was asked to star "with Donald Glover on a Mr. and Mrs. Smith series, based on the 2005 film." That failed due to "creative differences" and now "Waller-Bridge would write (but not star in) a Tomb Raider series." Both of these were roles that Angelina Jolie had, and she is among the handful of women who can carry an action movie.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's standout hit is Fleabag. I have seen (part of) the first episode. I find it hard to describe the genre, but it is British scatological humor. Think French and Saunders or a "Carry On" movie but with more toilet humor. It is about as far from action movies as it is possible to get. Perhaps the show is good, as "In 2022, Rolling Stone ranked Fleabag as the fifth-greatest TV show of all time" (beaten by the Wire, Breaking Bad, the Simpsons, and The Sopranos, beating the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mad Men, Seinfeld, and Cheers) but it is not anything to do with action. The other English shows on the list are Monty Python at 33, The Office at 53, Fawlty Towers at 68, and I’m Alan Partridge at 83.

Rolling Stone writes:

Sure, it’s rewarding when a TV show can provide dozens of hours of mirth across many seasons. Sometimes, though, the most satisfying experience comes from series that have a few things to say, say them perfectly, and then shake their heads and walk away before you can follow them into less-interesting story arcs. Never has that short-and-sweet approach been more impeccably executed than with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s tragicomic tour de force, where she played a self-destructive woman so lonely that her healthiest relationships were with her unseen television audience, and with the Hot Priest (Andrew Scott) with whom she fell madly in lust in the second season. And whether she was talking directly to us or not (in TV’s best-ever use of breaking the fourth wall), Waller-Bridge held the audience in the palm of her hand throughout. She made Fleabag as raunchy, as funny, and as sad — sometimes more than one of those at the same time — as she wanted it to be. And then she said goodbye.

Perhaps they intend to make a raunchy, funny, sad, Tomb Raider movie. Maybe it will be great.

Amazon recently renewed The Peripheral, a sci-fi drama from Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy that cost close to $175 million for eight episodes (sources say their final eight-episode season of Westworld at HBO cost about $140 million). Amazon has ordered six additional hours of The Peripheral despite what sources say has been lukewarm audience engagement. “It probably should have been canceled,” says an insider. “But they made a megadeal and the political capital they would lose with Lisa and Jonah would be too great. And they have other shows coming.” Fallout, the next show from Nolan and Joy, is also “extremely expensive,” says a source.

But a showrunner with considerable experience at Amazon sees it differently: “They don’t learn from their mistakes. They [say], ‘We can’t do any more deals like that.’ You turn around and they’re right back to — the impolite term is ‘star-fucking.'” For creative executives at the studio, the result has been exasperation. “They say, ‘We don’t want to buy from outside studios,’” says a former Amazon exec. “Then packages come and they buy everything that comes through the door, and our development is thrown out.”

One executive says it was different when Salke first took charge at Amazon. “She shot from the hip, she went with her gut, and she didn’t let data overrule her,” this person says. “But she hired a staff that was in over their heads in terms of being able to get those shows produced at a number. I think if we had [FX boss] John Landgraf or [HBO’s] Casey Bloys or somebody who had more credibility and direct interaction with the development of shows, it would be so much easier to spend less. But we kind of act like it doesn’t matter if we have deep conversations with talent. A guy like Donald Glover would think, ‘No way in hell I’m doing a deal with these guys unless they overpay me.’ I know we’re third or fourth on their priority list. Agents are direct about it: ‘You guys pay a premium for being Amazon.’ They have clients who would much rather work at other places.”

The general theme here seems to be bad leadership that believes it can shovel money at projects to make them succeed and who seem more interested in relationships with industry insiders who don't trust or respect them (and again, trying to paper it over with money) than developing a coherent plan.

When it comes to representation in media I still do think it's mostly about the bottom line. Even if most people prefer seeing white men on tv that doesn't mean the profit maximizing strategy is to make all your shows feature only white men. I suspect adding a token x character/story line is almost always a profitable decision because most people that don't like it won't stop watching because of it, but the people that do like it might actually watch it when they otherwise wouldn't have.

Having said that, I've recently moved away from thinking big corporations make woke decisions only because it directly improves their profit. It's hard to explain things like really aggressive diversity hiring at tech companies.

One possibility is that the best hires care a lot about progressive ideals. Even if the ideology causes the product quality to take a hit, it's still a better product than you would get hiring someone else. That seems to be the case with Will Graham.

Another possibility is that in elite circles progressive signaling gives you more status than the extra money you would have made not signaling.

I suspect adding a token x character/story line is almost always a profitable decision because most people that don't like it won't stop watching because of it, but the people that do like it might actually watch it when they otherwise wouldn't have.

More often I see it work out the other way; people who would've watched it end up skipping out (usually fans of whatever established franchise is being mutilated), and the "new fans" never appear, the agitators for change were never going to watch your show in the first place. Mostly those people only care about taking things away from their enemies, white men.

One possibility is that the best hires care a lot about progressive ideals. Even if the ideology causes the product quality to take a hit, it's still a better product than you would get hiring someone else.

This, again, doesn't seem to track. I'm reminded of the Witcher controversy -- the actor committed to the source material who actually brought in the eyeballs, and the production staff obsessed with ideology who tried to kneecap him and the show at every single turn and ultimately ended up putting people off it.

Even if most people prefer seeing white men on tv that doesn't mean the profit maximizing strategy is to make all your shows feature only white men.

Sure but suppose you have 10 shows, and you want to add token diversity by having 10% LGTB representation.

You could make 1 of them have a central LGBT focus, you could make all of them have 10% lgbt themes or anywhere in between.

When you go with 'everything has to be a tentpole, you end up with worst of both worlds where 3 of them are LGBT focused and the other 7 have 10-20% LGBT themes, and you've lost any diversity that includes "not about LGBT"

When you decide that "Not-LGBT" doesn't have any place in your definition of positive inclusivity, fine, that's a value you can have, but you are clearly leaving profit on the table for the sake of values. There is clearly a large an audience in America that is interested in content which doesn't feature progressive values. If you go with the tolerance includes intolerance of intolerance view, fine. But stop the pretense of the 'profit-maximizer' explanation

But you haven't said why it's clear studios are leaving money on the table. Even if some people prefer shows without woke content, do they care enough to stop watching? Do the people that care enough to stop watching outnumber the new viewers that are brought in? Sure, for the people that actually refuse to watch you could say there is untapped market share, but it's not like there's literally no shows without progressive content. Maybe whatever amount that is out there now reflects the actual demand.

My prior is that in the face of cold hard cash most people don't cling to ideology, particularly people that end up in positions to make lots of money in the first place, and particularly large corporations. Really, how much market inefficiency can a business tolerate? If viewership of every woke show literally went to zero, do you think they would continue pushing them? If we look at the most successful shows and movies now, they are diverse and progressive (marvel, last of us, etc). I think that "big corporations only do things to maximize their profits" is usually a strong default assumption and you need an even stronger argument if you want to argue against that.

Having said that, I've recently moved away from thinking big corporations make woke decisions only because it directly improves their profit. It's hard to explain things like really aggressive diversity hiring at tech companies.

So leaving ESG scores aside.

There's an easy Scylla and Charybdis metaphor to be made for companies deciding their level of wokeness. If a company acquiesces to internal activists with zero hesitancy, it ends up as a "Go Woke Go Broke" anecdote. On the other hand, if it ignores the social justice zeitgeist entirely, it stands out as a tall nail to be hammered down by lawsuits or activist fury.

As for really aggressive diversity hirers? They're just sailing a little too close to Charybdis. This might happen because it's safer/more satisfying for the people in charge of hiring, though not for the organization they work for.

They missed the lesson of the tale. The lesson isn't that you try to steer a course between Scylla (the monster) and Charybdis (the whirlpool). The lesson is you steer for Scylla and take the losses, lest you lose your whole ship and company to Charybdis instead.

it stands out as a tall nail to be hammered down by lawsuits or activist fury.

Nah, it's nowhere near as dramatic. If they lose a particular fight they just start pretending nothing ever happened, and that you don't exist. They might come after you again when the stars align, but for the most part they realize that if they don't score a kill, they're just handing their opponents free publicity.

People love reaching for these structural explanations, but they fail to explain the material reality.

Another complaint is that Sanders relies heavily on feedback from focus groups, which tend to favor broad and less inclusive programming.

[...]

Still, several Amazon veterans believe the system remains too dependent on those same test scores. “All this perpetuation of white guys with guns — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says one. And another: “Relying on data is soul crushing … There’s never, ‘I know the testing wasn’t that great, but I believe in this.'” Graham declined to comment.

It sounds like the argument is that the pro-diversity people think the metrics are measuring the wrong thing. It's a common complaint, especially about older TV shows but also about high-budget movies, that they are targeted at the broadest possible audience so they end up being utterly inoffensive but also completely soulless. That may really be the most profitable strategy. But it's also possible the most profitable strategy is appealing to multiple narrower groups with different shows but getting them very invested. The creators of shows probably prefer the latter because no one wants to be part of a designed-by-committee production.

It sounds like the argument is that the pro-diversity people think the metrics are measuring the wrong thing.

What metric would the pro-diversity people accept as showing them that they're just wrong? Seeing these sorts of arguments unfold in every conversation from the gender wage gap to racist policing, I get the feeling it's turtles all the way down.

utterly inoffensive but also completely soulless.

no one wants to be part of a designed-by-committee production.

But then why are all the pro-diversity productions soulless designed-by-committee schlock?

But it's also possible the most profitable strategy is appealing to multiple narrower groups with different shows but getting them very invested.

It's possible in theory, but it hasn't played out in practice, and all the pro-diversity people have to answer that with is denial.

I think Warhammer video games, of all things, shows that the "shotgun" approach can work.

Amazon's primary source of profit is absolutely not original programming. Or any entertainment programming. Their humdrum commerce business subsidizes this stuff.

That's interesting. Didn't know AWS was quite that behemoth-y.

That's because 74% of Amazon's operating profit comes from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

www.visualcapitalist.com

It hosts around 40% of the internet.

Turns out “the cloud” is a euphemism for “other people’s computers,” and those other people are Amazon.

This strategy is still in alignment with money-making goals. There is profit motive for streaming services to move away from focus-grouping. If the sampling is non-selective, such metrics indeed tend to favor bland, inoffensive pablum. Unlike big-budget movies, which profit on a per-view basis and therefore aim for the "general audience", streaming services are just trying to keep subscribers. They don't need every show to be watched by every subscriber, they just need every subscriber to be invested enough in at least one show to not drop their service.

In this sense it is optimal to adjust evaluation metrics to prioritize more niche programming, which will often naturally involve targeting identity groups. It doesn't matter if queer stories turn off general audiences. As long as "The Boys" (white guys with guns - and superpowers) or other shows keep general audiences subscribed, then it makes economic sense to add something that will get some subset of non-general audiences paying the montly fee.

It makes sense to add something for non-general audiences. But "something" isn't "almost every highly promoted show".

If I was in charge of such a company and could pick a show to be aimed at a small group, I certainly wouldn't pick Lord of the Rings.

In principle, I could see this making business sense. If you want to get as much viewership as possible, you would want to produce both mainstream, broad-appeal content and content that appeals to various niches. Focus groups only represent the median viewer, so basing everything on their opinions would systemically exclude the potentially profitable minority viewerbases. And by minority, I don't just mean queer women of colour etc., it also applies to less-popular genres and such.

I feel like focus groups in theory could be amazing, but in practice are complete garbage.

Problem one is the randomness. You don't want random. You want tastemakers, and obsessive critics. And you need to make sure you are only selecting tastemakers for niches you want to appeal to. Rings of Power should have gone and found ten people from YouTube that have made videos about the simarillion. Or that have reviewed the Lord of the Rings movies.

Problem two is the temporary nature. You should want them to stay on for a long time and track if you are doing better with them.

Given...certain recent events, there might be a renewed interest in discussing what redress (if any) we might have when a prosecutor misbehaves. Billy Binion of Reason Magazine tackled one of my favorite hobby horses in a highly recommended feature article: Absolute Immunity Puts Prosecutors Above the Law

I've written about the problem of having government officials with no accountability, from the standpoint of Seattle officials deleting evidence and within the context of the doomed over-prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse. Nobody voluntarily seeks accountability when they don't have to, and so there's nothing surprising about the state, with its purported monopoly on violence, choosing to shield one of their viceroys. If you have any interest in fixing this oversight, one of the problems you'll encounter (as I wrote in the APAB post) is how selective the outrage is. Except for the principled civil libertarians screaming into the void, no one else cares about a leopard's diet until the moment the first layer of facial epidermis is being torn off.

Let's set the scene by highlighting Binion's main example:

When a storm flooded Baton Rouge in 2016, Priscilla Lefebure took shelter with her cousin and her cousin's husband, Barrett Boeker, an assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. During her stay at her cousin's house on the prison grounds, Lefebure later reported, Boeker raped her twice—first in front of a mirror so she would have to watch, and again days later with a foreign object.

Lefebure's allegations led to a yearslong court battle—not against her accused rapist but against District Attorney Samuel C. D'Aquilla, who seemed determined to make sure that Boeker was never indicted. As the chief prosecutor for West Feliciana Parish, which includes Angola, D'Aquilla sabotaged the case before it began.

When a grand jury considered Lefebure's charges, D'Aquilla declined to present the results of a medical exam that found bruises, redness, and irritation on Lefebure's legs, arms, and cervix. Instead, he offered a police report with his own handwritten notes, which aimed to highlight discrepancies in her story. D'Aquilla opted not to call as witnesses the two investigators on the case, the nurse who took Lefebure's rape kit, or the coroner who stored it. And he refused to meet or speak with Lefebure at all, telling local news outlets he was "uncomfortable" doing so.

After that fiasco, Lefebure sued Samuel D'Aquilla in federal court, saying Boeker falsely claimed his encounters with her were consensual and sought D'Aquilla's assistance in blocking rape charges. According to the lawsuit, D'Aquilla was happy to help. Lefebure accused D'Aquilla of violating her rights to equal protection and due process by deliberately crippling her case against Boeker.

Lefebure's lawsuit against D'Aquilla bounced around for several years before getting denied on the theory that as a prosecutor, D'Aquilla enjoyed absolute legal immunity. If you want to get away with raping someone, it's a boon to have friends in high places that can pull some levers for you. Even better if this friend can get caught pulling levers and nevertheless retain absolute legal immunity for pulling said levers.

Absolute immunity is exactly what it says on the tin, it's absolute. Even though the federal law §1983 allows a lawsuit against "every person", the courts over the years responded with a litany of "well it doesn't really mean that":

The Supreme Court announced the doctrine of absolute immunity for prosecutors in the 1976 case Imbler v. Pachtman. The Court ruled that a man who had spent years in prison could not sue a prosecutor who allegedly withheld evidence that ultimately exonerated him. The justices approvingly quoted a sentiment that Learned Hand expressed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in 1949: "It has been thought better to leave unredressed the wrongs done by dishonest officers than to subject those who try to do their duty to the constant dread of retaliation."

I have to admit there is a kernel of reasonableness within this doctrine. Attorneys can be subject to discipline by their licensing authority if it receives a complaint, and probably to nobody's surprise the two fields of law that combined generate almost half of all bar complaints are criminal law and family law (the latter is toxic for its own reasons). I've said before that my clients have almost always done the thing they're accused of, but if you take some of my more sociopathic convicts at their word, it's everyone else's fault. Of course. The only reason they got convicted is because their lawyer sucked, or the judge was biased, or the prosecutor was evil, or whatever. And so on. People sitting in prison have nothing to do, which is why almost a quarter of all federal lawsuits are filed pro se by prisoners. Bar complaints follow a similar pattern.

As a public defender, it's not a matter of if you'll get a bar complaint, but rather when and I've already had a couple myself. Theoretically, it would be dreadful to have to deal with the spectre of retaliation from unhappy defendants that Learned Hand warned about, but all my complaints were summarily dismissed without my input. There is so much garbage shoveled in by bored inmates that a fatigue miasma sets in over the entire disciplinary field. Almost nobody involves takes anything seriously, including potentially some of the meritorious ones. There goes yet another one whining about their rights being violated, sure.

When federal judge Richard Posner retired from the bench in 2017, he cited serious concerns with the deplorable way his fellow judges treated pro se lawsuits. It's that fatigue again, and according to Posner the judges came up with as many roadblocks and technicalities to ensure the definition of a line to be the shortest distance between a pro se lawsuit and the recycling bin. True to his word, he did set up an organization to offer free legal counseling to pro se litigants, only to quickly shut it down after they were drowning with overwhelming demand.

You can see an illustration of how the assembly line shredder plays out in this case out of Louisiana. In the middle of a misdemeanor trial, the judge granted a "mistrial" to help the prosecutor come back with felony charges. This is as crystal clear a textbook violation of the double jeopardy clause as you can get, but every single state appellate judge (who are also protected by absolute immunity) just kept rubber stamping 'DENIED' without providing any explanation. This defendant was lucky enough to actually have a lawyer handle his appeal and he eventually won after sitting in prison for only 840 days. On paper, 28 USC §1657 states that criminal conviction appeals must be expedited. In reality, fuck you. The federal judges on this appeal took their sweet time, and apparently saw nothing wrong with dealing with civil matters first. It's yet another criminal complaining about his rights. Ho-hum.

The reasons SCOTUS outlined in Imbler v. Pachtman in favor of giving prosecutors absolute immunity was a generalized concern that if prosecutors had to worry about personal liability, they might avoid presenting relevant evidence as a pre-emptive precaution. Further, judges dealing with post-conviction appeals might have their focus "blurred by even the subconscious knowledge that a post-trial decision in favor of the accused might result in the prosecutor's being called upon to respond in damages for his error or mistaken judgment". If the way bar complaints and pro se petitions are treated today is any indication, it's not obvious to me that any floodgates would open here. The system already knows how to use a garbage can.

It's also not clear that the purported justification even matters here when the doctrine is blatantly self-serving. You can't sue judges and prosecutors for misconduct because fuck you that's why. Maybe the other reason this doctrine remains is that it's a Faustian bargain. Similar to the justifications for Qualified Immunity, occasionally putting our blindfolds on when an emissary of the sovereign commits a sin is just the price we pay for our undisturbed slumber. Our legal system promises equal treatment under the law, at least on paper. If we can't be selective about allowing only the Right People to pursue legal vindication against our esteemed pillars of the courtroom, it might potentially be used to help actual criminals. And we can't have that, can we?

I see all your points. I also see the counterarguments.

In principle, I agree, police and prosecutors should not have absolute immunity. And in theory, there is a remedy for bad actors: both can be disciplined and even removed from their jobs (and prosecuted in extreme cases) by internal review boards. In practice, a cop has to do something really bad to actually lose his badge, and I have no idea how many DAs have actually been subject to legal sanctions in the last 10 years, but I suspect that number is a much, much lower than it should be.

On the other hand, I do not think it's a small thing to fear the consequences of everyone unhappy with a cop or a DA (which would be... a very high percentage of the people they deal with) being able to sue them.

One of my more disreputable wastes of time lately is watching YouTube videos of, basically, people in trouble for being dirtbags like your clients. DUI arrests, tenant evictions, parole hearings, etc.

It quickly becomes very evident that there is a huge seamy underbelly of society made up of stupid, irresponsible, entitled, terrible people. And while the demographics may often look like what our HBD enthusiasts would assume, a lot of these people are white college students, soccer moms, grandpas... ordinary people, not just meth heads and welfare queens.

The majority of cops are reasonable and go out of their way to deescalate situations, and a lot of the people they end up arresting are... not even remotely reasonable or rational. These narcissists and sociopaths will commit obvious, blatant crimes and then scream at the cops for violating their rights when they're arrested. Putting handcuffs on them is abuse. I have seen so many videos of people turning what should have been a routine traffic stop into a felony arrest with them eating pavement because they decided to fight a cop over a traffic ticket. Sometimes they even do this while sober!

I have zero doubt that every one of those people would file lawsuits against everyone involved with their arrest and prosecution if that option were available to them. I don't think the system could handle giving all those suits any kind of fair consideration.

What's the solution? I think ideally, we'd put actual teeth into review boards and make cops and prosecutors actually fear being credibly (emphasis on credibly) accused of malfeasance. But no, I don't know how to accomplish that when you have professions policing their own with an obvious incentive not to police too hard.

At least based on my caseload, I can more-or-less confirm the impression you have about dipshits versus reasonable cops (although obviously the YouTube crowd is going to select for outrageousness).

I don't think the system could handle giving all those suits any kind of fair consideration.

Why not? I already mentioned that judges are primed to toss lawsuits in the garbage. If you get rid of absolute immunity, you'll get rid of a major legal hurdle, but there's no reason to think that the practical bias will change materially. Judges will have one less easy excuse to use the shredder, but they won't have none. If the video footage you cite is as clear as you describe it, why wouldn't a judge (who is already primed to favor police testimony) agree?

Reading any lawyer's take on the court system seem to be a quick path to depression and dark thoughts for me.

I did have my own thoughts on political law-fare last month.

As an outsider the whole system seems broken. I don't trust it to have good outcomes for me, regardless of why of I entered. I'm not even sure I can go in and be a juror without getting held in some form of contempt. If it happens to be a law I don't think is right, then I am not going to send someone to jail, regardless of the evidence. That viewpoint also conveniently sounds like lying to get out of jury duty.

I'm sure for people who work in the court system my fears probably seem overblown. I know in my rational mind I'm likely to have boring and uneventful interactions with a court of law, if any. But my heart screams in terror at the level of routine injustice carried out by the courts. Its a game rigged by them to always win. They only seem to lose by their own sheer incompetence (accidentally handing over exonerating evidence that they meant to with-hold).

I think at a minimum that if evidence was found to be withheld that later exonerates someone it should be grounds for immediate disbarment. And my hope, though I doubt it would happen, is that once disbarred they no longer should enjoy absolute immunity. So a single major fuckup means they lose their job. Two major fuckups and they can be held accountable. But I'd happily settle for them just losing their jobs.

All of this talk coming from the prosecutor in New York that no one should be above the law is just disgusting coming from someone who has absolute immunity.

I'm not even sure I can go in and be a juror without getting held in some form of contempt. If it happens to be a law I don't think is right, then I am not going to send someone to jail, regardless of the evidence.

Being late to court or disobeying the gag order while the trial is pending might get you held in contempt, but jury nullification won't

All of this talk coming from the prosecutor in New York that no one should be above the law is just disgusting coming from someone who has absolute immunity.

I didn't think about that. Rich.

Being late to court or disobeying the gag order while the trial is pending might get you held in contempt, but jury nullification won't

https://www.ndsn.org/dec96/kriho.html

Kriho was convicted, though the case was overturned on appeal 3 years later.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of that case before. Thanks for linking.

I’ve noticed a lot of your worst examples seem to come from Louisiana. From my vantage point in Texas, Louisiana is a notoriously corrupt state with legal institutions that are terrible by US standards. Is this a coincidence?

Louisiana's legal system is really weird by US standards, being (AFAIK) the only civil law jurisdiction in country. I imagine at least part of the reason you get the impression you do from it is due to it having different failure modes than common law systems, making those failures stand out more.

You should also consider why it has that Code rather than Common Law system, because Louisiana was a fully formed, settled, and important French colony before its addition to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. While other states had prior European colonization before being added to the Anglo-American sphere, Louisiana is near unique in having a pre-existing French Creole social elite prior to colonization that survived accession to the USA; where Californian Spanish/Mestizos did not.

Engaging in Dissident Rightist's favorite game of Noticing, while decades of immigration and migration have slowly eroded the prominence of the old Francophone Creole elite and Cajun underclass, when you find corruption in Louisiana {and Mississippi} you'll find French names. There's a history of an insular local elite minority, that intermarries and excludes, dating back to Jefferson. Roman Catholicism, the French language, and devotion to preserving their culture. Combined with the legacy of slavery, which produced an unassimilated Black underclass, you had a legacy of a local insular Arcadian/Cajun white underclass which tried to preserve its local traditions, and a local insular Creole elite that tries to preserve its privileges. Even in a functioning democracy, if the locals all choose voting for other locals from "old families" and hiring for official positions from local old families with Creole connections, you have a spider's web of connections and corruption that it is difficult for immigrants to penetrate without acquiescing.

It’s worth noting that Quebec is also notorious for corruption within Canada.

While France doesn’t seem notably corrupt by European standards, European standards include places like Italy even if we limit it to Western Europe, and I wonder if France is significantly more corrupt than the UK.

I didn't notice that and unless I see some information showing otherwise I'm going to assume it's probably a coincidence.

If we can't be selective about allowing only the Right People to pursue legal vindication against our esteemed pillars of the courtroom, it might potentially be used to help actual criminals. And we can't have that, can we?

But from your own description above, "help actual criminals" can mean things like "criminals filing meritless lawsuits because they have lots of free time in jail, and who knows, they may get lucky" and "potential lawsuits from criminals discouraging prosectors from beingng legitimate cases against them". These things help criminals, but not in ways that I'd want to encourage.

If you just want to help actual criminals, abolish the penal system and declare that all criminals immediately get released onto the streets. I guarantee you that'd be tremendous help to actual criminals.

Helping criminals is not the end goal here, it's just an incidental effect. Lots of things help criminals even though the demographic is not the core intended beneficiary. For example, the fact that police need a warrant to search a home.

I will admit I've never understood the argument for absolute prosecutorial immunity. I understand, at least in principle, that qualified immunity makes sense -- although in practice it's stretched comically far -- to protect good-faith but mistaken exercises of government authority. Especially in the heat of the moment, I can appreciate that mistakes happen. But prosecutors aren't operating in haste and should have plenty of time to consider their moral and legal obligations before they take actions. I don't think they can earnestly argue haste due to the right to "speedy trial", because trial dates seem frequently long-delayed.

Would someone care to convince me that absolute immunity in this context isn't just those in power protecting themselves at the cost of the rights of everyone else?

As the OP suggests, it's a question of numbers. Let's say 1 in 10,000 lawsuits are valid. But you don't know which one, so it takes some time to figure out. That's a massive amount of resources. Absolute immunity allows the court system to simply toss all those lawsuits out.

It's the frivolous lawsuit problem on steroids. Every person a judge ruled against or a prosecutor prosecutes has reason to file against that judge or prosecutor.

Well, for one thing, a prosecutor who is subject to suit would be very reluctant to look sideways at anyone with deep pockets. Those people would therefore have de facto immunity for criminal behavior. Courts have also noted that prosecutors would be reluctant to dismiss cases, once filed, if they turn out weaker than initially thought; they would want to get some sort of conviction, at least on a lesser charge.

There would essentially be a major principal-agent problem, with the prosecutor's personal interests diverging from the interests of the public.

Well, for one thing, a prosecutor who is subject to suit would be very reluctant to look sideways at anyone with deep pockets. Those people would therefore have de facto immunity for criminal behavior.

You made the same point last time in the context of QI and I have to concede it's likely to be a valid concern. My inclination is that it would still be worthwhile to get rid of absolute immunity, in part because money already affords a shield now.

with the prosecutor's personal interests diverging from the interests of the public.

IMO this problem already exists with absolute immunity: career prosecutors are highly incentivized to win prominent cases. There are plenty of examples of prosecutors withholding defense-friendly evidence or otherwise violating constitutional rights. I don't see a clear reason that prosecutorial immunity needs to be unqualified: at least we recognize theoretical bounds in the extent that police officers can violate rights before civil and criminal penalties should apply.

But thank you for the explanation, this thread has definitely made me consider a new-to-me reason why the legal system may be ill-suited to policing itself with respect to the broader public's constitutional rights and general interests. I'll have to ponder on how it could be better-aligned.

least we recognize theoretical bounds in the extent that police officers can violate rights before civil and criminal penalties should apply

To be clear, neither qualified nor absolute immunity protects either cops, judges or prosecutors from criminal prosecution, nor from disbarment or other discipline.

t’s possible to think of a dozen theoretical cases in which DAs not having immunity would either be hugely inefficient (anyone who could afford it would sue if they felt their case was handled poorly) or have a chilling effect on the justice system (by allowing DAs to be much more easily threatened or intimidated, as you note).

That's the theoretical fear, but given the presence of the institutional Fatigue I mentioned, it's difficult for me to imagine a world where these frivolous lawsuits actually have an impact. Even if we assume that judges allow the worst civil lawsuits to plod along, what exactly is the concern? Normal people like doctors, construction contractors, accountants, etc all face fairly high litigation risk, and they seem to manage the lawsuits ok. It's reasonable to assume that prosecutors would face an even higher risk given the number of angry people they would deal with, but concretely what exactly will be the impact of that? I'm trying to imagine what the worst case scenario would look like, but for anything salient to come up you'd have to start assuming that judges (who are mostly former prosecutors) will start entertaining frivolous complaints at an alarming rate.

We just went through a massive wave of anti-police, anti-DA popular opinion starting in 2020. Lots of judges are elected and activist groups might decide that the best way to get criminals out of jail is to scare the prosecutors by funding the election campaigns of judges who will allow these lawsuits to go through. Granted they could just work on electing soft on crime DA's directly, but this opens up a wider attack surface that's less legible to the voters. Also, setting the precedent that you can have your life ruined for prosecuting criminals would be more durable if the voters later change their mind and want a tough on crime DA.

this case out of Louisiana

Case documents for anyone interested: 1 2

You're embarrassing me. Thank you.

probably to nobody's surprise the two fields of law that combined generate almost half of all bar complaints are criminal law and family law

I was told by a bar interviewer that it was immigration, but maybe that is only in some states with lots of immigrants. There are certainly some attys who take advantage of desperate and poorly educated immigrants.

My source came from a CLE citing official state bar statistics. I can't imagine how immigration would come anywhere near criminal or family in absolute numbers, maybe they meant relative numbers? There's way more prosecutions and custody disputes than immigration proceedings. Representation is rare in the latter category and the biggest losers get deported out of the country, too far to bother with a bar complaint.

I dunno and I’m judging by attorney advertisements, but I see more ads for immigration lawyers than family lawyers in English(I live in Texas). If we assume volume roughly predicts advertising, with obvious exceptions for ambulance chasers and the like, then it looks like there are a lot of immigration proceedings that could generate complaints.

Advertisements are an imperfect proxy for volume because of how many lawyers are provided for free or low-cost. Criminal law is the obvious aberration, because around 80-90% of defendants qualify for a public defender. Some states and nonprofits also provide legal aid. My guess would be that immigration and family law are probably on similar footing on that front. The only other consideration I can think of is that immigration lawyers will chase after specific demographics, and that concentration will naturally encourage advertisement spending.

No, he meant absolute numbers. This was NY, so again it is going to be higher than the country as a whole. But it looks like in 2019 there were about 10 million arrests in the US, many of which were for relatively minor offenses. Re immigration, there were 9 million nonimmigrant visas issued. About 5 million were tourist visas, leaving 4 million. But that is 4 million visas issued; total applications were of course higher. Plus 1 million green cards issued, plus 800,000 citizenship petitions, plus immigration court proceedings. Plus consultations that did not result in official petitions. So there is actually quite a bit of immigration volume.

Interesting. In WA immigration bar complaints were 4.6% of the total.

What year was that?

PS: It is possible that I am misremembering, and the claim was re complaints resulting in discipline, rather than total complaints.

2021

The immigration biz plummeted during COVID so that might have been a bit of an outlier year.

And is that pct of complaints or pct of attorneys. Because shady immigration attys can screw over a lot of clients; this guy apparently filed almost 1200 green card petitions, of which one was approved.

Fair point about COVID. This was percent of all complaints filed that year.

Immunity seems like a good rule. Stops the lawsuits from going fractal.

If nothing’s going to change and the lawsuit will land in the garbage anyway, why overturn the rule at all? It’s not like it’s a good thing when de facto and de jure diverge. Lawyers do not need any more pay-to-play weapons to fuck with the system.

When you delegate a task or power to someone, controlling and second-guessing their every move defeats the purpose. I guess it comes down to a personal gut call on tradeoffs in the justice system, and I believe the current one is more fair than effective.

If nothing’s going to change and the lawsuit will land in the garbage anyway, why overturn the rule at all? It’s not like it’s a good thing when de facto and de jure diverge. Lawyers do not need any more pay-to-play weapons to fuck with the system.

There's two factors at play. There's the institutional fatigue that lands most lawsuits in the garbage, and then there's the actual Law™ in terms of how each lawsuit should be evaluated. I don't have any quick fixes to get rid of the fatigue, but even today it doesn't get rid of every lawsuit. Sometimes things get through. Adding yet more filters on what the legal standard the system is allowed to use just winnows that flour sifter even further.

It's that time of year again: The Masters, my favourite dose of noblesse oblige

I've seen it lamented numerous times here and elsewhere of the decline of noblesse oblige. I chalk it up to the internationalization of finance and wealth and the simultaneous decline in nationalism: the peers of the ultra-wealthy are the ultra-wealthy of other countries, not their neighbours or countrymen who they generally try to spend as little time as possible in the company of. God forbid that they might actually have to mix with the unwashed masses. Before you were obliged to in an attempt to forestall some peasant revolt from burning your estates, but now you've got private security defending all fourteen of your mansions, so what would really be the harm even if you lost one?

But at least in Augusta, Georgia there's some vestige of that lost spirit. Every year the Masters is held at the ultra-exclusive Augusta National Country Club, arguably the most prestigious golf tournament (give or take The Open) and the pinnacle of achievement of one of the hobbies of the elites. And every year the Masters goes overboard in creating a prestigious, elevated, and somewhat stiffly artificial environment. No expense is spared, no detail overlooked: the fairways are painted a verdant green, Rae's Creek is dyed its iconic dark blue, and the telecast features a chorus of (not-actually-present) birds so you can't hear the highway traffic. It's pure spectacle, and a treat to watch.

And you can watch it. Rather than hiking ticket prices to the eye-watering levels the open market would demand, the tournament distributes tickets via lottery ($140 for a day ticket, but if they hit the retail market they usually go for multiple thousands). And once you're on-site, the costs for food and drink are almost cartoonishly inexpensive. Oh, you couldn't secure tickets or are too far away? Well they built maybe the single-best website for watching sports: an infinitely customizable setup where you can watch whichever players or holes you wish. I've never used the app for mobile but people rave about it as well. These are both free of charge and have no region locks, and feature not one single advertisement or imposition upon the watcher. It's sporting entertainment at its ultimate best, built not for profit but purely for the prestige of being able to give it to the masses.

if the Duke had transferred his wealth merely a few years before he died, his children would have paid nothing anyway.

Well, yeah. If he wanted to benefit from the 7 year rule, he should have made the gifts earlier. He didn’t. Why should I want him to get the benefit anyway?

Forgive me for not being all that impressed with a class of people spending money they themselves did not earn for the public good in a manner that could not possible threaten their privileged lives. It is certainly better than if they had not done this but they're only marginally better than some beaurocrat spending my tax dollars because of their skin in the game and they fulfill the same role.

What would the moral option be? Is it able to be universalized?

Moral option? That's not really what I'm saying. I'm not judging them hugely negatively for continuing a pro-social tradition, I'm just also not giving them much credit. And I find the notion that these people are my 'betters' by an accident of birth completely ridiculous. It's like thinking that men deserve heaps of praise for using their greater strength that they gained from an accident of birth pro-socially instead of using it to subjugate women. Sure, the alternative would be much worse and there is something to clearing that bar, but it's the kind of grateful I feel about not having my home destroyed by a tornado, not the kind of grateful I feel about a good friend making a real sacrifice for my benefit.

To me inheretance is a right of the one passing on the wealth and speaks nothing of the person receiving the wealth. The social contract and debt society owes is to the originator of the wealth. That originator happened to decide that it would be best for his wealth to be passed down Patrik I early and that was his or her business and society should respect that use. The current heir is not significantly different to me than a government employee who got a cushy nepotism job where they don't have to do anything at all but are heavily encouraged by tradition to use at least some of the department's resources for pro-social ends.

Patrik I early

Was that supposed to be "patrilineally"? Huh, my spellcheck doesn't recognize it either. It recommends "Patri lineally", "patrilineal" and "matrilineally"! Feminist conspiracy?

Huh, I had actually iirc, specifically spell checked that word because autocorrect wouldn't fix it for me but I could have sworn I retyped it on my phone correctly and apparently it then happily destroyed it for me.

I mean to be fair, it was aristocrats who got Europe into World War One to begin with. The aristocrat class' sacrifices for their respective countries in the war perhaps should, I think, be viewed against that background.

And although quite a bit of scientific progress was done by independently wealthy gentleman scientists, I doubt that aristocrats have been the main drivers of the progress of science. For example, none of Newton, Euler, Gauss, Pasteur, Riemann, Maxwell, or Einstein were aristocrats. Of course one can easily also find examples of aristocrat-scientists. For example a quick search pulls up Lavoisier and de Broglie. But to me it seems that non-aristocrats have dominated the progress of science. So while aristocratic breeding might be nice and nice to be around, it might be only a minor factor in having made modern life so much better than the past had been. Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin and thus perhaps the man who contributed more than any other 20th century individual to improving humanity's lot, was the son of farmers. Jonas Salk, polio vaccine developer, was born in a from-what-I-can-tell unprosperous Eastern European Jewish immigrant family.

I don't have well-articulated thoughts on it yet, but the entire industry of golf, even outside the professional players, is maybe one of the last vestiges of 'elite' culture which hasn't been commodified down to a complete premium mediocre experience. Okay, we have to acknowledge that places like Topgolf attempt to distill the experience down to a mere amusement in the vein of bowling, but nobody, I wager, would consider it a substitute for actual golfing.

As you indicate, the lack of profit motive is obvious because the core of the industry is supported by the wealth of it's patrons, it has no need to scramble for peasant dollars. It stands to gain far more by catering to whales than relative minnows.

It is accessible to the common man in a way that, e.g. polo or downhill skiing (or on the extreme high end, Formula One Racing) certainly are not. You can practice the skills for <$20 a day at your local driving range. But it also has a near infinite cap on how much you could spend on the hobby, from top-of-the-line clubs made of exotic alloys and carbon fiber, to customized golf carts, to weekly lessons with top-skill experts. Somehow both the image of beer-chugging frat boys tooling drunkenly around the course in carts and the image of staid professionals, including CEOs of billion dollar companies and heads of state hashing out the details of vital financial/political matters between strokes can coexist here without contradiction.

And yet, AND YET, a guy who puts in the hours of practice using thrift-store clubs (that's where mine came from, growing up) will almost always win over the player who merely spent the first guy's yearly salary on equipment.

The very existence of golf courses are effectively a huge signal of the excess wealth your country produces. "We spend exorbitant amounts of money on meticulously maintaining 150+ acres of land not for growing crops, or industrial purposes, or even mass recreational games, but rather to let people wack tiny balls around in groups of 4." When you can literally devote huge swaths of prime real estate to 'nonproductive' use, you are flexing quite the surplus of capital.

It is also one of the few sports where traveling around to play at different facilities really means something as each one is designed to have unique features that will actually challenge you to adapt, rather than rigid uniformity.

There's also a delightfully nerdy aspect to it, given how many independent variables one encounters during the course of play, and slight alterations in any one of those variables (wind speed, the deflection angle of your wrist upon impact with the ball, the slope of the green, to say nothing of which club you select) can have outsized influence on the result.

And I'm not even a golf aficionado. I prefer Disc Golf as an actual hobby. But as hobbies go, there's virtually no downside, in our current culture, to being moderately competent at golfing and at least minimally conversant in the current professional scene (i.e. be able to name a few top players other than Tiger Woods, and their recent performance), since the interest can cross so many other cultural barriers, and you genuinely never know when you might get invited on a golf outing by someone influential whom you might want to make inroads with.

The very existence of golf courses are effectively a huge signal of the excess wealth your country produces. "We spend exorbitant amounts of money on meticulously maintaining 150+ acres of land not for growing crops, or industrial purposes, or even mass recreational games, but rather to let people wack tiny balls around in groups of 4."

While he's far better know for his culture war posts, Steve Sailor's golf architecture posts are consistently excellent.

And yet, AND YET, a guy who puts in the hours of practice using thrift-store clubs (that's where mine came from, growing up) will almost always win over the player who merely spent the first guy's yearly salary on equipment.

The game's inherent volatility is also such that the outcomes are variable enough (especially when combined with the handicap system) that it can work as a good social game in terms of the best golfer not always winning, which IMO figures into it's popularity. A bunch of more modern techy sports kind of have the issue that there's pretty huge skill demarcation. I do some bouldering and a lot of jiu-jitsu, which are both sports in which there's a good kind of conviviality but it's very hard to create a competitive game between enthusiasts and hobbyists.

Indeed, if you have your handicap dialed in you can have a 'competitive' game with even the most skilled of players.

But nobody will walk away with any illusions over who is better.

Even among the pros there's enough variability that the worst player going into a 140+ strong tournament can put together four great rounds and win. It happens time-to-time even at the major championships

Absolutely agreed with everything here. I've only ever played a full 18 hole course once (was invited by a friend who's really good, lost to him with my handicap 30 to his hanidcap 6) but I had a very very positive view of the whole experience and would have picked up golf seriously if I had the free time for it. If someone reading this does have free time to actually get good at it, from my almost total beginner point of view it seems to be very worthwhile.

Can I take this opportunity to try and convince some mottizens to learn to play golf?

  1. It is a game that you can play until the day that you die.

  2. The benefits to being good at this game are immense. If you are good at golf, other golfers will seek you out as a golf partner.

  3. #1 is especially true for charity tournaments and scrambles, where your ability to produce a winning score gives the person inviting you to play on their team prestige, and the person inviting you is almost certainly wealthy.

  4. The game is an easy route into the rich/upper class parts of society. You can play for very cheap (there are plenty of courses you can play for less $20 or so for 9 holes), but the price goes up from there to infinity.

  5. Even though the price does go to infinity, a $200/round game gets you to top tier courses to play on.

  6. Courtesy is considered a part of the structure of the game. Things like walking in others' "lay" (the path of travel for their ball on a putting green) are things you have to pay attention to.

  7. It's an extremely mental game, you have to slow your thinking down while hitting to be effective. You cannot "force" your way through a game with aggression. The game is more about learning to be graceful than something like basketball, soccer, etc.

I love golf. I was introduced to it at a very young age, luckily. I wish more people played it because I see the benefits large and also accessible.

unrelated: the markdown engine being used on the motte ignores the numbers at the beginning of numbered lists. Interesting.

The thrift store near where my mom lives always has a ton of golf clubs available. I have long considered putting a bag together out of them. What would be the next step? What's the very first thing you need to do in order to start?

Like - when I took up tennis as a kid, I got a buddy, two racquets, and some balls, and we went to a local court when it was deserted and hacked around all day until we started figuring it out. I don't wanna go take up room on the golf course when I have no idea how to hit the ball straight.

Find a cheap golfcourse near you, and go to the driving range (which is where golfers go to practice).

When you get there, you are going to look for the "pro shop" (this is a place that will have stuff for sale like clubs, shirts, etc. You can buy stuff from here, but...I wouldn't, unless you are buying stuff that has the course's branding on it and you want it as a sort of souvenir).

Tell them you want a bucket of balls. There is usually going to be two sizes, either small or large. Get a small one.

They will either hand you a bucket of balls, or a receipt that has a number on it. If they give you a receipt you take this to a machine near the driving range which will dispense the balls into a bucket for you.

In the driving range area, you'll see some sort of markers that show you where each individual person should stand while they hit their balls. Stand between the markers.

There are also tons of videos on youtube that will instruct you on things like how to grip the club (which is pretty important!).

Start with a club like a 9 iron[1]. Hit the ball much, MUCH more gently than you think you should. I'd highly recommend just swinging the club pretty slowly and concentrating on making contact with the ball. Seriously, how hard you hit the ball has way less of an effect than it would seem (this is counterintuitive).

When you're done with this, go back to the club house and sit at the crappy little restaurant they have a drink a beer. Congratulations, now you're a golfer!

Here's an intro golf lesson video you could watch that covers how to grip the club, etc: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1iOa2ZwGhbU

[1]: There are essentially two types of clubs. "Irons" and "Woods", so named because of the materials they used to be made from. Irons are smaller and wedge shaped. They are also shorter. "Woods" (which are no longer made of wood), have a more bulbous appearance, and much longer shafts. The numbers on the club indicate the angle at which they will strike the ball. Irons typically go from 3-9. 3 is the flattest angle while it contacts the ball, and 9 is the sharpest angle. 3 hits the ball the farthest, and 9 hits the ball the highest (and least far). When I say to get a "9 iron", this means the wedge shaped club with a 9 on it, and I'm telling you to hit with this club because it is the most forgiving.

I second and amplify @firmamenti's advice below. A day or two at the driving range learning to thwack the ball squarely and cleanly is the "hacking around until you start to figure it out" of Golf and once you're at point where you can hit the ball in the direction you intend at least semi-reliably, then you can go to a local short course and focus on the rest.

The best recommendation I have is to find a short course, executive course, or par 3 course. It will probably be less pressure, less crowded, and it will focus you on approaching the greens and holing out once you're there. It's also much less time commitment. Nine holes of par 3 golf can be played in under 75 minutes.

Head down to your local driving range, pick a lane off to the side if you can, and just start whacking some balls. You can get enough of the basics to have a good time just by watching a few basic youtube tutorials. Your swing will suck, you'll be slicing and hooking all over the place, etc., but it's a fun experience trying to iterate on each swing to improve. You'll probably want to book an hour or two of lessons at some point before you build any truly terrible habits, but golf is actually a lot easier than it looks, as long as you don't mind being terrible. Your best bet is to book the cheapest hour lesson you can find and/or find a buddy who can give you some tips, spend a couple afternoons at the driving and putting ranges to develop a little bit of technique, then just book a tee time and go golfing. It can be a little stressful when you're first starting out and you feel like everyone's waiting on you, but try not to let that get to you. If you notice someone waiting, offer to let them go ahead of you, or if you don't really enjoy putting and/or want to focus on your drives, just pick your ball up when you get to the green and move onto the next hole. I'd take my time, relax, drink a few beers, and not really worry about keeping score while you're getting the hang of things.

Golf is perfect for business because it's slow enough paced that you can hold a conversation

You and @johnfabian have convinced me. I went and made plans to visit a driving range with my dad. We'll see if I can't pick up some basic fluency again.

I'm sure your dad will love it. Playing golf with my dad is one of my favourite things to do, and definitely something we'll both remember as we grow older.

How did it go?

Haven’t been yet. We did Korean BBQ instead and planned to go one of the next two weekends. I’ll ping y’all with an update when we do!

I just bought new clubs. I golfed in high school, and occasionally over the years, but picked it up again in earnest in 2020, when some of my friends also started playing more. It's really nice to have a 4-some to play with regularly, or a roster of regulars from which to pull the group.

I can play with my dad, which is always a pleasure. I walk with a push cart, and there's very little else that can get me out of bed at dawn on a weekend, or that can make me spend 4 hours outside before noon, or that can make me walk and be on my feet for that much time.

I don't agree about the social/upper class aspect of it, but that's probably because I'm playing with old friends, and we're all poors playing muni courses. Not a lot of fresh blood in my groups.

I don't agree about the social/upper class aspect of it, but that's probably because I'm playing with old friends, and we're all poors playing muni courses. Not a lot of fresh blood in my groups.

I don't mean to say that golf is exclusively an upper class thing. The course I spend most of my time at is $20/round 9 hole course. I just mean that if you wanted a route into that group, that golf could provide it, and the path is well laid out.

Golf's "eliteness" varies from region-to-region. In the UK and Ireland it's very much also a working man's game. In Canada and Australia it gets a little more expensive, but there are still plenty of clubs to join in that $500 to $1,500 price range for a year's membership. In the US it gets even more expensive still, especially down south, but still affordable to a wide range of the population. Then in continental Europe it can be quite expensive and in east Asia it's truly an elite thing

In North America it's much more the country club setting that is elite than the game itself

Is this a game for people with compromised shoulders? If I can't do an overhead press without subluxing, will driving stress that failure point again?

I'm not sure but I would really encourage you to try it if you can! Keep in mind there are plenty of people playing golf well into their 80s.

I don’t care about any of those things. I’m also getting secondhand embarrassment from the obsession with status and recognition evident in your post.

And you can’t convince me that a game with infinite decision making time is more mentally demanding than one that actually requires reflexive genius.

And you can’t convince me that a game with infinite decision making time is more mentally demanding than one that actually requires reflexive genius.

Did I try to?

When you use it as a point in golf’s favor, obviously in comparison to other sports, then yes.

The prestige of the masters comes not from doing things that are expensive, but from doing things which require effort. When was the last time you went anywhere with a no-cellphones policy that was effectively enforced? If you are seen with a cell-phone at The Masters, you will be thrown out. While watching, you might notice the commentators' use of heightened language. This is deliberate. If you miss the fairway at Augusta, you aren't in the rough, you're in the "second cut". There will not be a single "distance to hole" infographic all weekend. The Masters might be the only organization in the Southern United States with the power to tell a major media outlet what to say on-air. That's prestige.

God forbid that they might actually have to mix with the unwashed masses.

Was this ever actually required? Like, how many noble people were walking through a peasant village and chatting with the locals like they were at a sports bar? You can have obligations that you fulfill without the emotional attachment to them.

A peasant village? Never. But up until the mid-late twentieth century, the rich had very personal relationships with their servants. Your maid was your maid, not the girl that the maid service you contracted sent over today. Feudal contracts vary across places and periods, but frequently included personal obligations by peasants to work at the manor house. Either a set number of days mowing the lord's fields, or repair work on the buildings, or personal domestic service. The nobles would very much, by the nature of their lives, interact directly with the peasantry every single day. Not on an equal footing, never as equals, but every single day they would interact directly.

Today corporate structures exist to insulate the leisure classes from personal relationships of exploitation. Even if I take Uber multiple times a day every day, I never have the feeling that I am personally exploiting any individual Uber driver. I sit in the backseat and scroll through Atlantic articles about how horribly Uber treats its drivers, but I am not personally responsible to my driver in particular. Rather Uber as an entity, or the CEO of Uber, or Venture Capitalists more generally take the blame. I don't exploit my cook or my waiter even if I eat out every meal, a variety of restauranteurs insulate me from that. I can avoid any personal repeated relationship with any of the people whose labor is exploited for my benefit.

Corporations and small businesses and city slumlords are the sin eaters of the American Professional and Managerial Classes. The nice liberal lawyers and engineers and bankers I work with can grumble about how awful the exploitation of the working class is, because other men are taking on that rough work so that their houses are cleaned and their meals are made and the cooks and maids have somewhere to live in the city.

Old feudal lords had to house their serfs, and order them around. They saw how they lived because they were the ones choosing how they lived. They had to pay them directly, when they needed them to work more they watched what that meant in real time. I can just grumble about rush pricing and how long I had to wait for my uber to take me home from the airport.

This is relativistic nonsense. A master’s/noble’s relationship to his slave/serf, according to this view, is no less exploitative than that between a uber client and his driver, perhaps even more ‘authentic’ and ‘personal’. It equates with ‘exploitation’ two radically different relationships, and creates a parallel between the state of mind/contempt of the slave master and the uber customer, as if that mattered. Whatever one thinks about someone, they need to be treated as a person and not as a dog.

One had right of life and death over the other. It was really a boon to the brotherhood of man when nobles flogged serfs for a perceived insult or a failure to perform adequately. Much empathy was borne from those interclass interactions.

There are three basic types of human relationships: friendly, transactional and hierarchical. Don’t pretend they used to be friendly. The relationship evolved from the harshest kind of hierarchical to transactional, and that has been a great thing for humanity.

You’d have to admit that thinking of someone as a person is much more likely f you see them and talk to them daily. If you see your personal maid sobbing because she can’t afford to take her sick child to the doctor, you cannot help but see a human there. When you have a new maid every week who’s assigned by another person, paid by that person and fired by another person, it’s a lot harder to see that person as a person and to care about that person as a person.

And most business and client interactions are set up this way. The CEO can freely cut health insurance, or lay people off, or increase workloads because he only sees the spreadsheet, not the people. The people in the business world are on the same spreadsheet as other business supplies and equipment. The baker is just another expense right next to the oven and the icing tubs.

And for consumers whether of goods or services, the workers are often hidden behind similar layers of abstraction. The American buyer of chocolate has never seen the fields where cocoa is grown. The online shoppers don’t see the piss bottles in the warehouse. So while they might read and essentially gawk at stories of exploitation in these hidden worlds, they don’t care in the same way they might if they knew someone who grew cacao or worked for an Amazon warehouse.

To be clear, your position is that living with slaves leads the master to see the downtrodden as fully realized persons, in a way the modern uber/amazon client or ceo can't fathom?

I think the usual reaction to seeing your personal maid cry would be to politely remind her that you don't feed her to cry, and she could still turn to prostitution and starvation if the performance of her duties to your house proved too much of a challenge.

  1. most people are not psychopaths

  2. historically it seems like it was generally perceived that domestic-servant slaves were much better treated than other slaves(eg fieldworkers, mineworkers), and the use of the term ‘house nigger’ today indicates that this perception was shared by the slaves themselves.

The contention that domestic servants directly attached to an aristocratic household were typically treated better than other members of their same social class seems well supported by available evidence.

The point is that all these tender moments rarely lead to a dissolution of the incredibly opressive relationship between master and slave. In a way the moral fault is even greater if the masters actually thought of their slaves as human beings. So if you say they were warm to their slaves and servants in their day-to-day life, that only displaces and exacerbates the cruelty to another part of the relationship. "Hey pal, can you put an end to the contract that says you can kill me with impunity, beat me and sell my children into slavery? Sorry dear, you know I can't do that". It's already ridiculous and slimy when your boss pretends to be your friend, I can only imagine what a slave would think of it.

I agree with your final point about the evolution of human relations. People do own their own labor and time to a degree never before possible.

However, @FiveHourMarathon has a point I don't think you can totally dismiss as "relativistic nonsense." Take an example that hasn't fundamentally changed in at least 100 - 150 ears; the Military.

A 2nd Lieutenant is typically between 22 and 25. A Platoon Sergeant (typically somewhere between E-5 to E-7 depending on factors and how fucked up the enlistment cycle has been) is within just a few years of age of that 2nd LT .... probably late 20s.

On paper, the 2nd LT is utterly superior in everyway to the Platoon Sergeant. Short of physical violence, the 2nd LT has dictatorial control. In real life, the platoon sergeant has about a decade of experience (and, for this generaiton, a lot of that in combat if its a combat arms MOS). They know then ins and outs of the organization, the duty station, the personalities up and down the command. If the 2nd LT does not strike a balance of experience deference to the Plt Sergeant while not looking weak in front of the men, he's going to have a bad time. A lot of self-conscious but very gung ho 2nd LTs will totally blow off the subtle suggestions of Plt Sergeants ... and learn some hard lessons about leadership the hard way.

The point is, even in a situation where, yes, you have close to absolute superiority in every way over a "subordiante" (fun fact the etymological root of Sergeant is Servant) if you're going to have a long term or just a non-transactional relationship with that person, you have to invest in the relationship somehow.

That relationship is still hierarchical, but it has almost nothing to do with the absolute superiority of the past, of servants and slaves. In pre-19th century armies (later for less enlightened societies, like russians or arabs) , the lieutenant could have the sergeant and his men flogged at will. This has proven to be a cruel and inefficient way of handling human relationships. This is the supposedly authentic and empathic model fivehour and the others are defending.

In pre-19th century armies (later for less enlightened societies, like russians or arabs) , the lieutenant could have the sergeant and his men flogged at wil

Yes, but he still needed them to be loyal and effective soldiers. There was even then a balance that had to be struck, and it was the accepted duty of the commander to command effectively as much as - if not moreseo - it was the duty of the soldiers to obey commands. Was it cruel? Surely that depended on the effectiveness of the commander - is it cruel to win? Was it inefficient? Consider a different world, where materials and manufactured goods are rare but illiterate, unskilled manpower is not.

But that is my point, they did not win, you don't get loyal and effective soldiers this way. You don't get a productive underclass either, the cruelty is not just gratuitous and prejudicial to them, it also harms the elite, their institutions and goals. Feudal peasants/slaves are unproductive, and feudal peasant armies are dogshit. Armies and societies which treat and treated their underclass with great brutality end up poor and lose wars.

e.g. , old monarchical armies versus more enlightened french and english, southerners versus northerners in the ACW, WWI losers (who had the harshest discipline and the highest number of soldier executions? Of course the garbage tier of WWI: Austria, Italy, Russia) , arabs in the latter half of the 20th century (earlier too, but now it's getting real embarassing).

Nowhere in my comment do I use the word empathy or even imply that peasants were materially better treated. My argument is solely that the gentry of times past were aware that their lifestyle rested on exploitation of the lower classes in a way that today's PMC are often able to deny to themselves.

One could easily say, as you do, that it's worse to be aware of exploitation and live it anyway. But the nominal equality that the modern liberal upper classes grant the lower classes comes with precious few material benefits.

For what it's worth I also reject your trichotomy. Human relationships come in millions of forms, shades of transaction, friendship, duty, love, filial piety, hatred, self aggrandizement, manipulation, jealousy, and hierarchy come into each one.

Where are you going with this? I can see here the basis of an ultrareactionary ‘slavery was good, actually. Russian absolutism and lawlessness is the way to go’ take, or a communist ‘capitalistic exploitation is just as bad as the worst examples in history”, I wouldn’t mind reading either, but this is just soft equivocation. What you proably call nuance and complexity, I call a refusal to differentiate. When you condemn all, you condemn none.

But the nominal equality that the modern liberal upper classes grant the lower classes comes with precious few material benefits.

Compared to when they did not have ‘nominal’ equality, they’re richer, healthier, more educated, live longer, work less, are protected from arbitrary corporal punishments, incarceration, forced labour, rape. But aside from those, precious few.

It would depend how high up on the chain you were, so to speak. "Feudalism" was a series of interwoven, reciprocal, personal arrangements between lords and vassals; if you were a King or Duke your vassals would be other nobles, but if you were a minor lord or knight or clergyman or landholder the people that were bound to you (and you to them) would be peasants. You would make your oaths to each other, you would feast them at least once per year (and likely more commonly than that), you would know their personal problems as it would be you who had to intercede in quarrels and disputes, and also succor (and exploitation) if a harvest failed or there was a fire, etc.

Like, how many noble people were walking through a peasant village and chatting with the locals like they were at a sports bar?

Depends on which level of noble, during which time period, and in which place. Of course, when nobility actually meant something it dictated a proper level of respect and/or courtesy between nobles and commons, so the whole "chatting like at a sports bar" thing was probably pretty rare. But you can definitely find examples of nobles having very good relations with local commons, and working for their benefit. Similarly, you can also find lots of examples of cultural traditions from the past where nobles ritually abased themselves or the social hierarchy was temporarily suspended or even upended. E.g., the "Feast of Fools," Saturnalia, the Christmas "Lord of Misrule," Carnival/Mardi Gras, etc.

The lower nobility was very much exposed to the peasantry and seemed to be generally preferred to the bourgeoisie by that same peasantry.

Some of this is urban-rural. If you lived in the country, you couldn't avoid getting your hands dirty - admittedly the peasants got theirs dirty working while the gentry got theirs dirty playing. If you lived in the city, there was a decent chance that the factory manager went home with clean hands while the factory workers were reaching for the Swarfega. Some of it is that the landed gentry tended to be physically tougher than the bourgeoisie in a way that manual workers respected.

You didn't just have to mix with them, you had to lead them into battle. With the rise of gunpowder and the demise of the knight in shining armour as a practical battlefield weapon, the role of nobles (and gentlemen below them) on the battlefield became as officers, and officering the army became the de facto function of the nobility. And the other ranks tended towards the worst kind of oik. As Wellington said:

I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.

If I look at my own family history (I am from a multi-generational upper-middle class family), all my (male) ancestors had a job early in their career where they had to give in-person orders to their social inferiors. My father's first graduate job was as a shift manager in a factory, and the previous three generations were military officers. The only people I have ever had to give orders to (apart from servants - one of the advantages of the UMC mindset vs. the PMC one is that you can save money by hiring servants directly rather than going through a corporate intermediary) are juniors in the office who are basically younger versions of myself. And that is typical of my generation - the only person in my undergraduate social circle who expected ever to be giving orders to social inferiors was the lady who spent her whole gap year working at McDonalds and got promoted to floor manager half way through. (Quite a few people from UMC backgrounds had worked on the line in shitty jobs like McDonalds as student summer jobs etc. - but that is temporarily slumming it with the proles, not leading them, and thus a very different experience).

What's UMC? I assume it isn't United Methodist church.

Upper-Middle Class?

Ah yeah that's probably it. I was stuck on 'Something Managerial Class'.

I spent a long time making the opposite mistake - thinking that the American usage of PMC was "Professional Middle Class". It didn't help that there used to be a website at classmatters.org (incidentally, a good website focussed on explaining to lefty activists why they were putting working class supporters off with inessential weirdness) which did use it that way.

Upper-middle class.

May be a British thing.

I think the rich try to blend in more than ever, like attire or downplaying wealth, but they are at the same time more detached in every other respect/aspect of life, such as school choice, resorts, secluded homes and such. The goal of designer clothes seem to be to convey wealth as minimalistically as possible to those who are receptive to it, but otherwise oblivious to everyone else.

Just an amusing observation - you wrote reasonably long post about golf without ever once using the word golf.

No he didn't

Damn, that one mention of golf, oops

Watch? The way you ostentatiously described it I'd think I could play there.

I would need more evidence to believe that noblesse oblige has actually declined compared to fedual or industrial revolution times, or even compared to say the 1950s. It is not like rich people do not give money for charitable purposes these days. You might be right, you might be wrong, but in either case I think that we would need to look at some data before deciding whether noblesse oblige has actually declined. For all I know, it might be stronger than ever these days.

It is not like rich people do not give money for charitable purposes these days.

Oh, they give money to charity.

Charities are their primary vessels for influence laundering and a literal cancer on society.

Any chance at real reform must focus on preventing international 'charitable' organisations from spreading influence in your country, and preventing such idealistic social tumours from being created in your own land.

Could you summarize that piece?

The article is talking about charitable foundations rather than individual donations. Rich people set them up then hand over the management to professional charity administrators. The article argues that the money then gets diverted to standard leftist causes, regardless of the original donor's intentions, and that this is especially true for foundations that are set up to continue after the original donor dies.

Thanks!

Yeah, I want to know what motte-and-bailey it uses, but I don't care enough to suffer through it.

Having read it, as far as I could see it doesn't use motte-and-bailey arguments, it highlights a real problem (large caritative funds are free money for a class of professional managers to invest in whatever their own pet causes are, uncoupled from any requirement of being efficient, and sometimes clearly against the intentions of individuals who provided the initial capital). The problem with the article imo is how blunt and unsophisticated the author's solution is, pretty much "just ban them". I haven't read anything else on this blog or from this author so perhaps he does not care about setting dark precedents and preserving liberalism. To those of us who do, a more elegant solution to aligning incentives and ensuring such entities either don't spring up or aren't hijacked, perhaps a more social than political solution, would be a lot more palatable.

No, that’s pretty much what I had in mind. Maybe “Bailey” isn’t as accurate as “Strawman.” He’s attacking the worst case for charities—trusts that represent the interests of an entrenched PMC—and damning the whole field accordingly.

I went ahead and read it. Even in his just-so story, the Bill Foundation spends $3M on “handshake worthy causes” even as the globalists (coincidentally all women) start to take hold. Assuming everything after the first year is meant to be rubbish, since the author namedrops Soros, the foundation still spent most of its money on causes approved by the founder!

Of course, to Moldbug fans, this is temporary, and Cthulhu will only make the balance worse. So the author concludes caritas delenda est. Don’t bother building something, not if the leftists will benefit from it. Ford’s trust send some money to racial grievance studies? Can’t have shit in Detroit.

As an aside, Mr. Smoke misses the part where the Ford Foundation was set up by Edsel Ford, son of the rather more famous Henry. It spent its first decade funding hospitals and museums and, conveniently, avoiding a 70% inheritance tax. After the war, it pivoted to a stance of global philanthropy. I have to wonder if the author thinks it was A-OK up till that point.

I get the impression that Mr. Smoke has a very low tolerance for leftism. We can’t really put a number on that, because all his real-world examples are assumed rather than proven worthless. A charity has “Muslim” in the name; surely it provides no value other than sucking welfare?

All in all—abysmal article. 3/10.

It's hard to define charity. Is a tax write off sort of thing, a tax shelter?

Wimbledon has a similar system of providing affordable front row tickets (though by a queue rather than by lottery), while the US Open has no such system.

On the upper end, the US Open main stadium has private rooms available to anyone willing to pay exorbitant prices, while at Wimbledon money alone won't get you the absolute best seats, which are reserved for club members and special royal or celebrity guests.

I always though that was something of a microcosm of the differences in US vs UK culture and their views of class, so it's interesting to see a US golf event more resembles Wimbledon in this regard.

Been reading an article about the child "transgender" story and something really caught my attention. The quote first:

Casey expressed no discomfort with his sex as a child, but when he turned 13, he said, he discovered through friends and online that “transgenderism was a thing.” He started researching this and felt, “Holy crap! You can do that?” Soon he declared he was “gender fluid.” Casey explains, “This means that my gender changed based on the day. Then it got to the point where I was never feeling masculine or like a boy.” After about six months of being gender fluid, Casey says, “I decided that I was a fully transgender girl. Like I wanted to present as a girl and I wanted people to see me as a girl. So, I started to socially transition. I was going by a different name and using she/her pronouns.”

That lasted for a few more months until, he says, “I started to lean more kind of in-between. I didn't identify as a girl as much. But I did not see myself as a boy, so I identified as non-binary, which is what I am today.” He explains being non-binary means he is neither sex, and to go along with this he changed his name again—to something as gender neutral as “Casey”—and began using they/them pronouns.

So there I realized even though I am very far from woke, the propaganda has warped my understanding of the issue too. I was thinking what happens in such cases is some child suddenly starts very strongly feeling that they are the opposite gender, and then the system gets involved and "affirms" them in their delusion. But what is happening here is nothing of the sort. It's more like childish fascination with the unknown and unexplored and cool, which gets turned into much bigger thing that it should be by both the parents who are completely unable to provide the child the necessary structure ("just be what you are", wtf is that, that's not a kind of help the confused child lost in a confusing world needs) and the system which actively problematizes and medicalizes any case it can get the hold on.

The result is predictable - the system deploys the tactical nuke of "if you won't transition now, you child will surely kill himself and it'll be your fault", the parents fold like wet paper, child gets put on puberty blockers, develops severe mental problems, has to take five medications at the same time, becomes suicidal, the system reacts "see, we told you! if we didn't rescue them in time, them'd be dead already!" and refuses to budge. The parents finally see what a huge fuckup they did and start running around, screaming and writing articles.

The article worth a full read, but this was the part that struck me the most. It was how easy it was to get from a childish curiosity about "you can do that weird thing? really? let me try it on!" to being pulled into the machine and turned into a case and somebody whose life would forever be dependent on the medical system (and, of course, forever "oppressed"). I thought it's more like "X has a severe problem and it's hard to solve it and looks like the system doesn't always do the right thing the right way" but it's more of "X has been playing and waded too far into the woods, and the ideological ogres captured him and made his life into a problem with which he'll now have to live forever". Which is quite infuriating to me in its pure evilness.

It's worth pointing out that Blue Tribe is crowing about how this story has been debunked, because an unverified twitter account claiming to be the child in question is saying, despite all the facts in the article being correct, that they don't place the same emotional valence or cause and effect on it that the mother in the story does. They especially and annoyingly split hairs in that they admit the doctors said trans teens kill themselves without treatment, but the doctors never said they would specifically. See, totally no longer pressuring the parent! And it goes on and on with more of the same.

Of course my favorite, and typical, reaction is here at The Hill. Robby Soave, who seems to have made a career out of being insulted by irate leftist for plainly stating correct facts gets the typical reaction you'd expect when he brings up that children are being sterilized. I wish we could see the look Brie gives him when he brings that up, but the camera isn't on her. We can assume it was a helluva stink eye from how you can see her face turning before the camera turns away, and from how quickly Robby tries to ameliorate whatever offense she shows she took.

They especially and annoyingly split hairs in that they admit the doctors said trans teens kill themselves without treatment, but the doctors never said they would specifically. See, totally no longer pressuring the parent!

Ah yes, the regulators don't let us to tell you your kid will kill himself if not put on puberty blockers, but since we can't tell you your kid will kill himself we can tell you other kids, who are totally not your kid, kill themselves all the time, but we're not talking about your kid, because the regulators would not allow us that. So, no pressure, totally your decision whether you want your kid to kill himself or not, we have no idea what'd happen, or at least we're not allowed to tell you what's happen, only that all other kids who are completely not your kid, did kill themselves, so you can choose anything you like. Also please sign here that we totally didn't pressure you about anything like telling you your kid would kill himself.

I think this proves too much.

Consider bariatric surgery on an obese patient. It's elective, and it has risks and benefits. It's shown to cut the risk of cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes in half. If your doctors tells you, look, we can't tell you that you will die of a heart attack, but people who don't get this surgery die of heart attacks all the time, so no pressure, it's your decision whether you want to have a heart attack, we have no idea if that'll happen, at least we can't tell you whether it'll happen or not because the regulators won't let us, so you can choose anything you like, and please sign here that we totally didn't pressure you about anything like telling you that you'd have a heart attack.

If you think that puberty blockers don't actually reduce the risk of suicide, then that's a real objection, a matter of fact, and someone is right and someone is wrong.

But in the world where puberty blockers do significantly reduce the risk of suicide in teenagers with gender dysphoria, what's the right thing to do? Not tell their parents about it? Informed consent is complicated, but communicating the risks and benefits of an elective procedure has to be part of it.

If you think that puberty blockers don't actually reduce the risk of suicide, then that's a real objection, a matter of fact, and someone is right and someone is wrong.

The objection is that it is an experimental treatment, and that they're using the risk of suicide to push it, even though they have no evidence that it reduces the risk. There's place for experimental treatments, but you shouldn't scare people into trying them out.

Okay, that's fair! So, to be clear, this is a question of fact, and if the best estimate we currently have says that puberty blockers are, in particular circumstances, linked to a lower risk of suicide, then you wouldn't have an objection?

they have no evidence that it reduces the risk

I'm aware of Turban et al. (2020) and Tordoff et al. (2022). Note that as of 2018, a literature review concluded that "the psychosocial effects of gender-affirming hormones in transgender youth have not yet been adequately assessed". So at that point, the right thing to tell patients and parents would be different. But it looks like you can reasonably say that puberty blockers are indicated in certain circumstances, and not using them carries an increased risk.

A lot of this is fucking hucksterism and money grabbing. These doctors should be ashamed of themselves. The worst offenders should lose their licenses.

I agree that Tordoff et al.'s work is of lesser quality, and that there simply doesn't exist gold-standard evidence on this issue. I find Turban et al.'s work more convincing.

This is the quality of the evidence base on which doctors are sterilizing children and making lifelong medical patients out of them.

To be clear, we're talking about puberty blockers, which "are falsely claimed to cause infertility and to be irreversible, despite no substantiated evidence".

The WPATH standards, which are on the radical side of global medical opinion (Scandinavian rules, as @arjin_ferman points out, are much more restrictive) emphasize social transition, then possibly puberty blockers, then possibly cross-sex hormones, then possibly surgery. To the extent that it looks like this standard of care isn't being followed, those reports are themselves untrustworthy.

If you're upset about something going on in the world, it behooves you to make sure you're clear on what's actually going on.

To be clear, we're talking about puberty blockers, which "are falsely claimed to cause infertility and to be irreversible, despite no substantiated evidence".

While your response is ok in the context of raggedy's bombastic claim, I'd like to caution that this "falsely claimed without evidence" business is itself rather bombastic. What they most likely mean by that ist that there is no evidence blockers directly, permanently, and reliably cause infertility. What they most likely don't mean by it is that there is no evidence for any impact on fertility.

Right off the bat, we are talking about a drug that is also used for chemical castration, so it would be wild if it didn't have at least a temporary impact on fertility. Secondly there's the question of when the puberty blocking is started, if you block puberty at or before stage Tanner II, where by WPATH's Marci Bowers' own admission even your ability to orgasm is seriously impeded, would that have no impact on fertility? Various gender clinics are quite cautious on that:

Where puberty has been suppressed through the use of blockers there are no immediate fertility options, as the sperm and eggs have not matured. However, this is not a permanent state of affairs (and, as Ehrensaft and Hastings remind us, no one – regardless of gender identity – has ‘guaranteed’ fertility options.)

 

Use of GnRH analogues might also have long-term effects on:

- Growth spurts

- Bone growth and density

- Future fertility — depending on when pubertal blockers are started

I found another paper that seems to have a more sober tone, and even your Lancet article seems to have resulted in a lot less bombastic follow-up, but SciHub not being what it used to be, I couldn't verify what exactly they said.

EDIT: Originally I thought they meant "irreversibly cause infertility", but I just noticed that the reversibility claim is made separately from the claims about fertility:

are falsely claimed to cause infertility and to be irreversible, despite no substantiated evidence

That's just an outright lie. There is no way to bring a person back on their original development trajectory after they have been affected by blockers. Neither the article, nor the paper cited under "no substantial evidence" link addresses the reversibility of the effects puberty blockers have on a person.

(Scandinavian rules, as @arjin_ferman points out, are much more restrictive)

I want to emphasise that it's shaping up to be a European, not just a Scandinavian thing. The UK also restricted their standards, the French National Academy of Medicine issued a statement urging caution, and the Belgian Center for Evidence-Based Medicine is throwing heavy shade at the state of research as well.

The WPATH standards, which are on the radical side of global medical opinion emphasize social transition, then possibly puberty blockers, then possibly cross-sex hormones, then possibly surgery.

Maybe this is what you meant by "on the radical side" but it's worth noting that after publishing the original version of the SOC, that various researchers actually signed on to, they immediately issued a correction removing the minimal ages for gender affirming procedures. There's a whole bunch of other controversies resulting from the latest SOC which, personally, put the credibility of the entire organization in question, but that's not related to your point.

To the extent that it looks like this standard of care isn't being followed, those reports are themselves untrustworthy.

Keep in mind that the reports that these reports are untrustworthy, are themselves untrustworthy. The people who were originally casting doubt at Reed's story are now claiming she/journalists committed HIPPA violations by providing evidence.

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So as promised here's my links.

  • In 2019 the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services published it's review of the literature on gender dysphoria in children and adolescents concluding there's little evidence (and no randomized controlled trials of children and adolescents). The review resulted in a change in policy on how blockers are administered, first at the Karolinska Hospital, and later nationally. The National Board of Health and Welfare concluded that the risks of puberty blockers currently outweigh the benefits, and they should only be administered under a research framework and in exceptional cases.

  • In 2020 UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence published a review of the literature on puberty blockers. The report concludes that to the extent there's evidence for good or bad impacts of blockers, the quality of the evidence is rated at "very low certainty". The review was used in the Cass Report resulting in the shutdown of Tavistock's gender dysphoria clinic.

  • In 2023 the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board published their report on Patient safety for children and young people with gender incongruence. They similarly conclude there's not enough evidence to routinely prescribe blockers to children with gender dysphoria, declared blockers experimental, and recommended that the Ministry of Health revise their national guidelines to restrict the administration of blockers.

There's been similar noises out of France and Belgium, but I've only heard about scientists raising an alarm, rather than an official report being published.

Thanks! I'd previously seen the difference between the Swedish model and WPATH recommendations, and kinda dead-ended there, because I'm not a researcher, just a layman trying to do my homework. (For example, I don't know how you could ethically do an RCT on puberty blockers in children and adolescents.)

I do notice that the NICE report excludes Turban et al. (the strongest evidence I'm aware of that puberty blockers reduce the risk of suicide) with the explanation "Intervention – data for GnRH analogues not reported separately from other interventions". (I don't understand why the criteria were set to exclude nearly every study.) On page 19 and following, it relies entirely on de Vries et al. (2011), which is a prospective study of seventy people, to conclude that "This study provides very low certainty evidence that treatment with GnRH analogues, before starting gender-affirming hormones, may reduce depression." So, in plain terms, it looks promising, but we don't have enough information to have a strong opinion.

It looks like the state of evidence is different now than it was in 2018. These questions are, generally speaking, answerable, and it looks like the best information we have indicates that puberty blockers reduce the risk of suicide in adolescents with gender dysphoria. Perhaps a good use of time would be to develop better diagnostic tools so that dysphoric adolescents who will likely not pursue transition aren't offered puberty blockers, and those who likely will, are.

(For example, I don't know how you could ethically do an RCT on puberty blockers in children and adolescents.)

Why is it ethical to RCT every other medication before it gets approval?

I do notice that the NICE report excludes Turban et al. (the strongest evidence I'm aware of that puberty blockers reduce the risk of suicide)

On that one in particular, I'd read some of the comments at the bottom of your link:

Given the controversy surrounding the practice of puberty suppression for gender dysphoric adolescents, the article by Turban et al.1 creates more confusion than clarity. The authors imply causal evidence for a reduction in suicidal ideation with transgender adolescents who received puberty suppression (PS), yet they fail to acknowledge the exceedingly high rates in both groups of suicide ideation (75% and 90%) and suicide attempts (42% and 51%). The cross-sectional design using online survey data is insufficient to validate the efficacy of such a life-altering therapy.

...

What is more disturbing is that the PS treated group actually had double (45.5% versus 22.8%) the rates of the control group for serious (resulting in inpatient care) suicide attempts in the year preceding the data collection (Table 3)

 

Because adolescents with greater suicidal ideation were less eligible for puberty blockers, this automatically created an initial negative association between the two—before the treatment took effect. Therefore authors’ finding, from adults surveyed many years after treatment, is compatible with three scenarios: puberty blockers reduced suicidal ideation; puberty blockers had no effect on suicidal ideation; puberty blockers increased suicidal ideation, albeit not enough to counteract the initial association between suicidal ideation and eligibility.

The authors acknowledge that “the study’s cross-sectional design… does not allow for determination of causation.” (...)

Aside from the spurious leap from association to causation, the analysis is inevitably limited by the poor quality of the data.

Firstly, the survey’s respondents are not sampled from any defined population. The convenience sample excludes those who underwent medical intervention but subsequently stopped identifying as transgender. It also excludes those who did commit suicide.

Secondly, the key questions on puberty blockers confused some of the respondents. The survey report cautions that “a large majority (73%) of respondents who reported having taken puberty blockers [in question 12.9] ... reported doing so after age 18 [in question 12.11] ... This indicates that the question may have been misinterpreted by some respondents who confused puberty blockers with the hormone therapy given to adults and older adolescents” (James et al. 2016: 126). To mitigate this problem, Turban et al. follow the survey report in ignoring those respondents who reported taking puberty blockers after the age of 18. No such adjustment is possible, however, for the question asking whether the respondent had ever wanted puberty blockers, which Turban et al. use to define the subset of respondents in their analysis. Therefore the comparison group will include an unknown number of respondents—possibly the majority—who actually wanted cross-sex hormones rather than puberty blockers.

Thirdly, many questions have a large number of missing values. Of the 89 respondents who took puberty blockers, only 11 answered the question on whether they had been hospitalized as a result of attempting suicide in the last 12 months (question 16.5).

 

to conclude that "This study provides very low certainty evidence that treatment with GnRH analogues, before starting gender-affirming hormones, may reduce depression." So, in plain terms, it looks promising, but we don't have enough information to have a strong opinion.

I don't think studies at "very low certainty" can be considered promising. From what I understand we're still in the midst of a replication crisis, so between that and publication bias, "positive finding at very low confidence" should probably default "it's probably just noise".

It looks like the state of evidence is different now than it was in 2018. These questions are, generally speaking, answerable, and it looks like the best information we have indicates that puberty blockers reduce the risk of suicide in adolescents with gender dysphoria.

It might be answerable eventually, but the question is too complex to settle on the basis of the latest paper. Keep in mind we're not talking about the optimal way of setting a broken bone, or even about the best therapy for cancer, which has a lot more pitfalls. We're talking about psychiatry, a field that spent years prescribing SSRIs for depression only to go "oops, they might actually be no better than a placebo". With things like suicide in particular, we know there's a significant social contagion component, where even a silly Netflix show for teenagers can trigger a wave of suicides. So with ubiquitous messaging about trans healthcare saving lives, "would you rather have a happy daughter or a dead son?" etc, you don't even know if you're measuring the impact of the puberty blockers, or the impact of the messaging.

Finally, there being a positive signal in the literature that blockers may reduce suicide risk does not justify scaring the parents into allowing blockers for their kids. Far more confidence is needed to make such statements ethically.

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I'll gather my links tomorrow, but there are a more recent reviews from several European countries concluding that to the extent there is evidence for puberty blockers, it's quality is poor.

Aside from that, in the case of most other medications, you don't get to make such sweeping claims on the back of a few studies, and you have to go through blinded clinical trials before you can perscribe them for a given condition.

At best blockers could be considered experimental, and anyone trying to scare people into taking them is acting extremely unethically.

There's a difference between evaluating risk for oneself and being pressured to do allow procedure on a kid. People are usually much more vulnerable to manipulation via the kids than via their own fears (think of the children!).

If you think that puberty blockers don't actually reduce the risk of suicide

I have no idea what the statistic is. We're not talking about averages and populations here. Bludgeoning parents with the suicide threat on the first sign of child being confused about his identity is not something that a honest specialist would do. If there was substantial risk of suicide, and the parents would ask about it, then the specialist should provide options to reduce it. Using it as a bludgeon is despicable.

Not tell their parents about it?

Tell it when such risk is relevant. "Complicated" is not an universal excuse - consent may be complicated, not using underhanded tactics to force it - is not.

an unverified twitter account claiming to be the child in question is saying, despite all the facts in the article being correct, that they don't place the same emotional valence or cause and effect on it that the mother in the story does

First, there are no verified accounts on Twitter any more. The legacy policy required that accounts be "authentic"; the new policy requires that accounts be "non-deceptive", but in no way actually checks that.

Second, they don't claim that "all the facts in the article [are] correct". From the article:

Within a semester, Casey went from all As and Bs to a report card dotted with Ds and Fs.

From the thread:

The article mentions that my grades dropped from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s in a semester. This is a completely exaggerated statement. My grades were on a steady decline since 2020 due to unrelated mental health concerns.

From the article:

Caroline assumed counseling at the center would help Casey sort things out. But in retrospect, she says, what the psychologist at the center did was solidify the idea that Casey needed medical intervention for his gender distress.

From the thread:

I was in counseling with the Washington University transgender care center in which I was treated amazingly by my counselor. She was a friend to me and offered a great amount of support. This was taken away when my mom revoked consent for the Supprelin.

The article doesn't make any effort to determine that the effect of counseling was, if the counselor recommended or encouraged medical intervention, just repeats Caroline's opinion. It leaves an unchallenged implication; the kid denying it is meaningful.

They especially and annoyingly split hairs in that they admit the doctors said trans teens kill themselves without treatment, but the doctors never said they would specifically. See, totally no longer pressuring the parent!

Is there a way to give informed consent here that isn't pressure under this rubric? Hey, if you don't get this shot, you're much more likely to die of COVID, but we're not pressuring you, right? Doctors are supposed to explain risks and benefits to the patient for any procedure; how can they provide information without "pressuring" someone?

Is there a way to give informed consent here that isn't pressure under this rubric? Hey, if you don't get this shot, you're much more likely to die of COVID, but we're not pressuring you, right? Doctors are supposed to explain risks and benefits to the patient for any procedure; how can they provide information without "pressuring" someone?

By providing dry info. X% of people with your condition day within Y days, Z% of people who take this treatment have a A% chance of living to age B.

I guarantee you that the doctors did not do that in this case.

I guarantee you that the doctors did not do that in this case.

I'm not a doctor, and I'm certainly not an expert in communicating with people. But is that how doctors communicate in other circumstances? Does a doctor who notices that you smoke simply provide dry info and leave it at that? From what I can tell, standards around informed consent focus on whether or not information has been provided in a legible way to the patient or caregiver, not on the fastidious maintenance of strict neutrality.

I don't know how this was presented, and neither do you. But it's a stretch to say that it was presented meaningfully differently from how other medical procedures are offered, i.e., it reflects the standard of care in medicine generally. And if your issue is with the standards for informed consent, why tie it to a controversial set of procedures where the public, at least, absolutely does not agree about the risks and benefits?

In short, the dialogue looks like this to me:

A: Caroline was unethically pressured into approving puberty blockers for her child.

B: It looks like that pressure took the form of explaining risks and benefits.

A: Anything going beyond a bare recitation of the facts is undue pressure.

B: That's a standard that medicine, in general, does not meet.

It looks like either you're holding gender-nonconforming medical interventions to a uniquely high standard, or you're expressing a general issue you have with medical-ethical standards in an unnecessarily controversial manner.

I don't know how this was presented, and neither do you

I do know it wasn't presented in the way I described, because if you plug in the relevant numbers you will not get anything that can be seen as pressuring the parents into having their child take blockers.

It looks like either you're holding gender-nonconforming medical interventions to a uniquely high standard

You originally claimed it is not possible for a doctor to give information about a medicine, so the patient can give informed consent, without pressuring them into taking it. You can't criticize me for holding blockers to a higher standard, when all I did was give an example you asked for.

As nasty as it is: in order for this suicide stuff to have teeth a good number of trans kids need to die by suicide. If it's a political thing or fashion, fine, but how many teenagers are willing to blow their brains out over fashion choices?

At the end of the day, it seems like some of this is the old left’s anti-authority views- parents saying ‘no, that’s retarded, I can’t quite explain why but in five years you’ll be glad I didn’t let you go through with this’ isn’t a valid objection even when it is obviously correct.

At the end of the day, it seems like some of this is the old left’s anti-authority views- parents saying ‘no, that’s retarded, I can’t quite explain why but in five years you’ll be glad I didn’t let you go through with this’ isn’t a valid objection even when it is obviously correct.

I used to listen to a parenting podcast several years ago, and one of the hosts had a daughter -- age 10-11, maybe? -- who decided she was a boy. A good portion of the show became about this subject. The mother, a good California liberal with a fringe Hollywood career, was very honest about the heartbreak of reconciling with her sense of loss when one of her girls "became a boy" and chose a new name for herself, when the name the mother had chosen for her daughter had been a meaningful choice to the mother.... But the mother accepted this new identity, etc....

Sometime after the initial turbulence of this transition, in one episode the two hosts were talking about their kids' eating habits, and the mom with the transgender child was indignant that her kids often has the temerity to reject her planned meals and wanted either alternate meals or junk food for dinner. The gall of transgender son to think that they can dictate to their mother something as important as what they will eat for dinner! Where would a kid ever get such an idea?

It's possible to explain, but an average parent probably would need a specialist support. Only there are no specialists that can support them now - there's woke transing disassembly line on one side, and I guess there's some conservative Christian support options which one probably wouldn't even consider if you aren't already a conservative Christian, and of which I know next to nothing, and so probably the average parent. And in modern Western world, where most people don't have the ingrained reflex of "the system is not your friend, it will hurt you and all you love" - this becomes an easy trap to fall into.

The conservative Christian support options exist, but they’ll start with ‘male and female he created them’ and then call in the TERF’s if they need secular arguments.

It’s probably worth noting that trans kids are specifically a liberal elite phenomenon, and conservative Christian authorities don’t particularly need to put together a set of secular arguments about it because that’s not how conservative Christian youth behave when they experiment with leaving. And honestly, the liberal elite parents are much less likely than average to call a pastor when they’re dealing with a situation- as any catholic priest could tell you, it’s not exactly uncommon for pastors to receive help requests from people who are not religious beyond going to whatever church is closest on Christmas and Easter.

That's my point - for a mildly liberal normie, who still doesn't want their kids life to be sacrificed on the altar of Trans, there's no support system. There are a lot of people like that, in fact majority of the people I know would likely qualify.


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