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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30990 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Is there any indication that the opposition is any more competent and less corrupt?

This is an important point. Live long enough and you grow to become very skeptical of the Western narrative that different leaders will create different outcomes. People cheered when Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and became leader of Burma. They jeered when she went on to persecute the Rohingya Muslims. The Arab Spring told a similar story. As did the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Simply adding Western democratic mores to a third world country doesn't seem to change much.

There is, however, one type of leader who tends to create long-term positive impacts for a country. And that is a benevolent dictator, or dictator-lite. Examples of leaders in this mold are Rwanda's Paul Kagame or Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. Perhaps the most salient current example is President Bukele of El Salvador who has already achieved massive quality of life gains for his citizens by declaring martial law and throwing all the gang members in jail.

While these leaders improve their countries and achieve huge popularity, they are not cheered by Western governments and NGOs, who tend to favor untested opposition groups who inevitably become corrupt the moment they are handed real power.

There is, however, one type of leader who tends to create long-term positive impacts for a country. And that is a benevolent dictator, or dictator-lite. Examples of leaders in this mold are Rwanda's Paul Kagame or Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew.

That list is tiny, and you might have to drop a few if you consider whether they have successfully locked in their gains and had an orderly succession to a still flourishing system.

Nobody has any idea how to make Lee Kuan Yews or General Parks*, or they'd make a dozen of them. Often people act enlightened to fool the West and then do whatever (Obama used to think Erdogan was that guy) Which is why a lot of people default to "get a democracy going".

TBH there is no "Western narrative" - there's many. Even in the same government you'll find people supporting democracy and change until they turn around and support the only strongman on the grounds that they're the ones who can keep the state running or, at least, do what the US wants (basically Obama's relationship with Egypt after the Arab Spring).

(I don't think you're wrong about Western NGO-types framing people like Bukele as autocrats for violating "civil rights" but that just makes me skeptical that he is autocrat, as opposed to proving he's a successful one)

* This being The Motte, someone might also remark on it being a strange coincidence that the examples that immediately come to mind are East Asian...

This being The Motte, someone might also remark on it being a strange coincidence that the examples that immediately come to mind are East Asian...

Very true. We don't have a model for how to bring a country like El Salvador or Rwanda up to 1st world level. This also being the Motte, I think we need to accept that this is likely impossible due to HBD.

So what Bukele is doing in El Salvador is really terrific. Going from murderous shithole to, let's say, Mexico level would be the likely maximum of what's possible. But people will criticize him for anything short of Nordic-level democracy.

Why do you believe that HBD is the limiting factor, and not geopolitics, geography, or just self-reinforcing systems? For that matter, how do you judge the “maximum of what’s possible” for a given country? I am confident that Mexico does not represent the peak of Hispanic achievement.

People will criticize Bukele as long as his policy looks suspiciously beneficial to him, personally. As a distant second, they may criticize the human right violations inherent to his chosen approach. But the important thing is that locking up everyone who might stop you is the oldest trick in the autocrat’s playbook, other than killing the outright. Whether or not it is also effective, that’s the main source of criticism.

I am confident that Mexico does not represent the peak of Hispanic achievement.

‘Hispanic’ is a broad and extremely diverse category. It’s entirely consistent to think that Mexico-level prosperity is towards the top of what’s possible for El Salvador(Mexicans seem to think this is well out of reach) while acknowledging that, say, Costa Rica can be much richer.

Obviously you can also think that El Salvador can achieve much higher than Mexico currently does. But El Salvador, Mexico, and Costa Rica are three very different countries that happen to speak (different dialects of)the same language. It’s not unreasonable to expect them to have different futures.

That’s pretty much exactly why I objected to the OP. Saying that El Salvador can’t do better than Mexico does right now is…bizarre. Since he led with “because HBD,” I assumed he was painting them with the same brush.

It’s worth noting that Mexico has a much, much better hbd situation than El Salvador from the perspective of ‘what percentage of the population is above 95 IQ’, because in large parts of Mexico the average person is phenotypically Spanish and that presumably extends to IQ.

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People criticize Bukele because they have zero skin in the game and don't have to suffer the consequences of their criticism. What does a Western NGO care if El Salvador collapses into anarchy again? They don't have to live there.

Hanania has written a couple essays about this which I've found rather convincing:

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-invisible-graveyard-of-crime

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-midwit-meme-and-the-denial-of

From the comments of the first article

Excellent analysis as ever, Richard. One thing I'd emphasise is the unique savagery of the gangs in question, which I think has an important bearing on this argument.

Following this story on Twitter, I keep seeing affluent American liberals complaining about 'creeping fascism' etc. receiving replies from actual Salvadoreans saying things like, 'Shut the fuck up, these people cut off my uncle's head for not paying extortion money and left it in our doorway.'

I very much agree with his assertion in the second article that analysts often try to avoid mentioning (or even thinking about) tradeoffs in political discussions, even that's almost always how the real world works. Being honest about tradeoffs is a good strategy for correctly comprehending the world, but not for "winning" arguments.

Somewhat related to the civil rights violations of prisoners, I remember the arguments about Guantanamo back in the War on Terror days. It was common to hear politicians and pundits - in full seriousness - make the claim that "torture doesn't work anyway." I hated the fact that, post-9/11, it was politically impossible to say "torture is against our values, so we won't do it even though this makes our anti-terror efforts less effective and costs lives." Despite the fact that (I suspect) most people would agree privately with this statement...

The context I always got for "torture doesn't work" was that, while torture works great to get an insurgent to confess that his neighbor is also part of the insurgency, torture is great at eliciting that confession whether it's true or not. If you're lucky you get to parade the neighbor's IED cache out in front of the neighborhood and you have 1 fewer insurgent; if you're unlucky you have to let the suffering neighbor go and you still might have pissed off his further neighbors and cousins and so forth sufficiently to have 5 more insurgents.

Thus everyone had to go to the "ticking time bomb" thought experiment to get a real ethical conundrum: if the tortured suspect is being asked for information where a lie won't hurt any (more) innocents and won't radicalize any more enemies and will be quickly and reliably discovered, then we have to determine whether our values are really enough to say "no".

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Yeah, I was actually just reading those (and finding them convincing) but one of the articles he linked about the difference in Western European policing vs American (basically: European cops have more leeway in policing which means they can provide more consistent but lower-level deterrence vs. American cops who are hobbled by rights and respond by oversentencing those they do have dead to rights) was even better for his argument tbh.

Really fits the view that it's just tradeoffs and all of the sacralization doesn't help think about them.

EDIT: David Simon of all people basically came out and said "Hanania an asshole [which he is] but he's not wrong". I wonder how The Wire "fans" will react? They shouldn't be surprised but you know how that goes.

This being The Motte, someone might also remark on it being a strange coincidence that the examples that immediately come to mind are East Asian...

Does Juan Carlos of Spain count?

Salazar of Portugal (1932–1968) is often given as an example of a benevolent dictator. There are a lot more example that aren't East Asian. France-Albert René of Seychelles is another.

I have never seen Salazar described as benevolent. Wikipedia says:

One opposition leader, Humberto Delgado, who openly challenged Salazar's regime in the 1958 presidential election, was first exiled and then killed by Salazar's secret police. (...) Salazar's rule is widely described as dictatorial and was characterized by systematic repression of civil and political rights, mass torture, arbitrary arrests, concentration camps, police brutality against civil rights protestors, electoral fraud and colonial wars that left hundreds of thousands dead.

That’s a highly selective quote when Wikipedia with a left bias includes a lot of quotes like this

“According to American scholar J. Wiarda, despite certain problems and continued poverty in many sectors, the consensus among historians and economists is that Salazar in the 1930s brought remarkable improvements in the economic sphere, public works, social services and governmental honesty, efficiency and stability.“

If you read your own Wikipedia source then you would find many paragraphs describing him as benevolent.

Here's a book on Salazar.

https://www.amazon.com/Salazar-Dictator-Who-Refused-Die/dp/1787383881/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&tag=reasonmagazinea-20

Fifty years after his death, Portugal's Salazar remains a controversial and enigmatic figure, whose conservative and authoritarian legacy still divides opinion. Some see him as a reactionary and oppressive figure who kept Portugal backward, while others praise his honesty, patriotism and dedication to duty. Contemporary radicals are wary of his unabashed elitism and skepticism about social progress, but many conservatives give credit to his persistent warnings about the threats to Western civilization from runaway materialism and endless experimentation.

For a dictator, Salazar's end was anti-climactic--a domestic accident. But during his nearly four decades in power, he survived less through reliance on force and more through guile and charm. This probing biography charts the highs and lows of Salazar's rule, from rescuing Portugal's finances and keeping his strategically-placed nation out of World War II to maintaining a police state while resisting the winds of change in Africa. It explores Salazar's long-running suspicion of and conflict with the United States, and how he kept Hitler and Mussolini at arm's length while persuading his fellow dictator Franco not to enter the war on their side.

Contrast Portugal's outcomes to Spain (Civil War) and Italy (Fascism/WWII) and he looks pretty good. But yeah, I doubt you're going to find mainstream hagiographies of any dictator.

But yeah, I doubt you're going to find mainstream hagiographies of any dictator.

Does an obituary of an austere religious scholar focusing on their academic career rather than time spent as dictator of a terrorist state count?

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Yes, fair point that my sample may be biased towards Third Worlders and developing nations for multiple reasons.

I would expect a benevolent dictator to actually rule the country for a while as dictator. Juan Carlos basically immediately had Spain transition to a democratic constitutional monarchy with a figurehead monarch.

Pinochet was close to those god level rulers. Chile is the richest country south of our border.

A dictator who murdered thousands and imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of people is not benevolent.

Why does that matter? He killed the right people (communists). And put the country on a path to have the highest per capita income in the region.

It’s not like these other dictators didn’t kill and imprison people.

As I told someone else, "Yes, actually, murdering all my political enemies is a good thing" is inflammatory enough to require more than a low effort hot take like this.

And you've been posting a lot of crappy comments like this, and apparently bans and warnings aren't making an impression.

So while this comment itself was only a little bit bad, you're getting another one-week ban because we're tired of you posting one "little bit bad" comment after another.

Expect future bans to escalate.

When communism had a body count well into the tens of millions in the half century prior to the events described, “political enemies” does not do the category justice.

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The economic gains from removing communists makes the helicopter fuel pay for itself.

Low effort and just waging culture war.

If you seriously believe murdering communists is a good thing, you need to put a lot more effort into what you want to say.

If you're just trying to be funny, don't.

Park Chung-Hee and Lee Kwan Yew and Paul Kagame no doubt invite their opposition leaders to give conferences in five star hotels.

Honestly I think a big part of the difference in western attitude towards those three from the Latin generalissimos is that the critics of the latter are more sympathetic to the western literati, rather than actual behavior and results.

Presumably Park, Lee, and Kagame also don't escalate to systematic murder. I would especially hope not in Kagame's case, as the Rwandan Genocide most likely gave his people the moral high ground of subjugating genocidaires, even when they started shit with Zimbabwe.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones.”

The monarchies of Jordan and Morocco have not been democratic and have generally done very well by local standards- certainly better than we expect Arab democracies to do. The gulf monarchies have also produced Islamist petrostates that are at least much better than Libya or Iran.

Trujillo seems to have improved his country pretty massively, as well.

The gulf monarchies have also produced Islamist petrostates that are at least much better than Libya or Iran.

There is a massive "being an enemy of America is not good for your health" confounding factor here though right?

This is entirely true, but Arab petrostates which are not gulf monarchies don’t seem to be able to avoid making enemies with the US.

Live long enough and you grow to become very skeptical of the Western narrative that different leaders will create different outcomes. People cheered when Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and became leader of Burma. They jeered when she went on to persecute the Rohingya Muslims. The Arab Spring told a similar story. As did the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Simply adding Western democratic mores to a third world country doesn't seem to change much.

It is my understanding that the revolution in Tunisia was successful and the country is now doing well.

The Western narrative?

There are always attempts to brand a politician as a bold outsider. I think they’re usually met with appropriate cynicism. Obama got around it because of the economic upheaval. Trump…I’m still not sure how he convinced people he would Drain the Swamp. Most everyone else on the national stage is rightly recognized as a cheerful part of the status quo.

The real Western narrative is assuming all dictators are malevolent. Personally, I find this reasonable—how can you tell them apart before it’s too late?

People cheered when Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and became leader of Burma. They jeered when she went on to persecute the Rohingya Muslims.

Two points:

  1. Aung is probably still in the good graces of those in favor of democracy, given that she got couped by the military a little while ago.

  2. She's not exactly responsible for the Rohingya's ethnic cleansing, she merely failed to protect them from their Buddhist neighbors.

the results do show that most Thais are fed up with the status quo

Is it the "status quo" they don't like, or is it the king, personally? I don't know very much about Thailand, but my understanding circa 2010 was that the (then) king was overwhelmingly beloved, an important figure in culture as well as politics. He died in 2016, and his successor was apparently already unpopular at that point. In principle, opposition to having a monarchy is different from opposition to having this guy as the monarch. I recognize that in practice, the difference is largely academic--I just wonder how many other changes (perhaps including the LGB stuff?) are essentially riding the coat-tails of what is actually public distaste for a specific individual.

Why we don't have a 10 hour work week.

I am not an economist, but it feels like there is an easy and obvious solution to why we don't have a 10 hour work week despite increased economic productivity.

Let's say I work 40 hours a week. I get paid 100k per year. Now, let's say I negotiate with my employer a deal to work only 20 hours a week. How much should I get paid?

The answer, of course, is much less than 50k. Although I will be doing half as much work, the overhead of my employment (health care, HR, managing me) has not decreased by 50%. Perhaps, depending on that overhead, the value of my half-time employment is now only 25k a year, or maybe even 0!

Let's take this a step further. Let's say I'm a surgeon that trains for 10 years and then works for 30 years after training. Let's assign a cost of 1 to the training years and a benefit of 1 to the working years. The surgeon has a net value of 20. If now, he only works half as much, his net value doesn't go to 10, it goes to 5. We now need to train 4 times as many surgeons.

People naivëly assume that, as a society, we have a choice to work half as much and be half as rich. I don't think this is the case. By working half as much, we might see a 75% or more reduction in material prosperity.

This is obvious when we look at who works. Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more. People who earn more per hour tend to work more hours. They get highly compensated for additional labor, and are therefore more incentived to perform it. This is as it should be. A society where the highly skilled work fewer hours is one that seems a massive decline in standard of living (as per the surgeon example above) Expensive assets need to be utilized more completely than cheap, replaceable assets. We can afford it if the poor work few hours. In fact, in the United States and other western countries this is already the case.

This obviously has huge implications for inequality. Too reduce inequality, we have to reduce the rewards that high-income people get for their labor. But this will cause a large reduction in the hours worked by high skilled people and will cause a much larger decrease in GDP than the reduction in hours. By tolerating inequality, we can have a much higher level of economic output, and thus more money to be spent on social welfare programs. The costs to reduce inequality are very high indeed.

What you say about the overhead of work definitely makes sense, and I agree, but my question would be, why have we decided as a society that a 40 hour workweek is the general standard? How did we come to that particular number? Why is it that most employers don't require a 60 or 80 hour workweek instead, even if only implicit? Why are almost all work places willing to tolerate 40 hours as the optimal balance between overhead and productivity?

It's probably just tradition. I'd point out that very high value employees (surgeons, CEOs, Tesla engineers) often do work 60 or 80 hours a week.

Tradesmen usually work more than 40 hours a week but are expected to kick their apprentices out of the van to avoid them getting overtime. So ‘government regulations’ are the obvious-seeming reason- blue collar workers would have to have their hours cut the rest of the week to work Saturdays, and once they’re shut down lots of white collar employment is just network effects.

I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each. I don't know why 5 workdays became standard instead of 6 or 7. Perhaps 7 was out due to the influence of Christianity in most Western nations meaning there had to be 1 day of rest, and perhaps 1 more day on top of that just made sense for giving people more flexibility.

I don't know why 5 workdays became standard instead of 6 or 7. Perhaps 7 was out due to the influence of Christianity in most Western nations meaning there had to be 1 day of rest, and perhaps 1 more day on top of that just made sense for giving people more flexibility.

In the US, until relatively recently, there was a 6 day work week. From Wikipedia:

In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.[12] In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday, due to pressures stemming from the October Revolution,[citation needed] which witnessed the ruling class persecuted for not giving the laborers dignifying conditions. In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the United States slowly followed, but it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide.[12]

I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each.

This was explicit in some of labor movement arguments for the 8 hour workday. For example, Wikipedia has this banner reading

8 hours labour

8 hours recreation

8 hours rest

Of course, it's fucking criminal that commute time comes out of "recreation" time and not "labour" time.

If my coworker buys a condo that's a two hour series of public transportation transfers to our work, should he get to work half days every day?

And me paying much more for my house and car that affords me a 20 minute commute. Shall I work a full day to pick up his slack?

No, he should get paid for his time commuting though, or he probably shouldn't have that job.

Why should he give up an additional four hours of his time per day -- half his recreation time! -- for free?

Because he could have chosen to live across the street from his place of work. Commutes are basically a self-imposed Georgist tax of sorts.

So he's going to get paid the equivalent of half a senior engineer's salary to wait two hours each way each day because he bought a condo in the city and takes public transportation.

I will work as much as him but not get paid that extra 50% total pay amount because I chose to buy a place reasonably close to work.

Choose to live near work or choose to burn personal time traveling to work. If someone values their own time so very little that they get a place far from work, then no one owes them any money. We certainly don't need the perverse incentive of paying people to have extra long commutes.

So he's going to get paid the equivalent of half a senior engineer's salary to wait two hours each way each day because he bought a condo in the city and takes public transportation.

That time is not his own, so yes, he should be compensated for it.

I will work as much as him but not get paid that extra 50% total pay amount because I chose to buy a place reasonably close to work.

And you are being paid in four hours of time per day.

Choose to live near work or choose to burn personal time traveling to work. If someone values their own time so very little that they get a place far from work, then no one owes them any money. We certainly don't need the perverse incentive of paying people to have extra long commutes.

On the contrary, it's you who doesn't value your time, as you spend it on work, willingly, without asking for recompense. And we don't need to be wasting our lives on ever-longer commutes from cheaper outlying towns into designated economic activity areas, either. Maybe the employer can implement remote working if it bothers them so much?

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It's a trade off no matter what. Currently he is trading that time for the luxury of his home arrangement at the budget he likes. Alternatively he can keep the time and pay more, or keep the time and money and live somewhere crappier.

He's getting $100k/yr for ~2000 hours at his desk. You are getting the same. The fact that it takes him 3000 hours of work (and you only 2100) to reach those 2000 desk-hours is immaterial. If he doesn't like getting paid $33.33/hr (vs your $47.62), he should find a different job.

EDIT: for the other half of your solution: Should he be banned from a mutually-acceptable job at $33.33/hr with 12-hour days, just because the wage must be $47.62 for that position?

The fact that it takes him 3000 hours of work (and you only 2100) to reach those 2000 desk-hours is immaterial.

No, it's not. It's the most material fact of all! Work should not be so able to cut into a person's free time! This should not be so accepted! Shed your slave morality and work to live, not live to work!

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I'm so glad I get to spend my 8 hours of recreation commuting, paying bills, dealing with house issues, cleaning, shopping, etc.

Well what's the alternative?

Well, I guess if they factored the fact that everyone has to manage their own life into the equation, and devoted some time to that, too. Or at least commuting time. 7 hours of work, 7 hours of recreation, 1 hour commuting, 1 hour dealing with other shit, and 8 hours sleep. Or something.

I work from home, what do I get?

Dunno. I'm not claiming to have a perfect system or anything. I just think that if the "8 hours for ___" system is really why things are the way they are (and I have heard that referenced before as a reason), then it seems pretty shitty that so much of people's time is prespent on stuff that doesn't make them happy or better off in any way. It can certainly be difficult to manage one's life on so little time per day, and still feel happy and like life is worth living, that you're not just frittering away your life doing chores, with no recreation to speak of.

You get to masturbate during staff meetings, what more do you need?

At the time the 8 hour day campaign was going on, your wife would have done most of those things. Commuting is an obvious exception, but according to my relatives on the working-class side of the family, typical working class commutes were much shorter then than they are now. (My grandfather was able to cycle home, eat, and cycle back to work within his lunch hour).

Why are almost all work places willing to tolerate 40 hours as the optimal balance between overhead and productivity?

Capital holders don't prefer such low hours, but they'll take what they can get when labor movements win. The 8-hour day has an interesting enough history and it surely doesn't look like the shareholders simply deciding that it's the optimal amount of time to get max returns.

Anecdotally, quite a few people that "work a lot" are actually just nominally present for a large number of hours, available in a fashion that's close to on-call, but not really doing what you'd think of as work. How many of us that post here do so while we're "working"? How many things are purchased on Amazon during standard office hours? The standard work week may not have formally changed, but quite a few white-collar employees have quietly elected to work 20 hours per week and most businesses don't seem to really care as long as the core work gets done.

but quite a few white-collar employees have quietly elected to work 20 hours per week and most businesses don't seem to really care as long as the core work gets done.

Another explanation is that businesses have no way of measuring core work and tolerate lots of useless mouths, i.e. Twitter prior to Elon.

But you're forgetting about all those new products like Nexus Q and Google Plus and Google Health and Google Pay and Hangouts and Loon and Google Fiber and Allo and...

(OK, Google Pay actually still exists. But the first few iterations burned, fell over, and/or sank into the swamp)

Google is a mature company which wants its shares to trade with the P/E of a startup (in the sense that senior and middle management have a very direct, personal, interest in a short-term run-up in the stock price, not in the long-term profitability of the core business). The easiest way to do that is to convince investors that management are entrepreneurial geniuses who are going to come up with another "big enchilada" that will be as profitable in 2040 as Google Search is now. Both management and the investors know that getting there involves a lot of failed investments. So investing in all those new "products" is somewhere between an honest-but-unsuccessful strategy of running an internal VC operation and an unusual way of spending the investor relations budget.

How many of us that post here do so while we're "working"? How many things are purchased on Amazon during standard office hours? The standard work week may not have formally changed, but quite a few white-collar employees have quietly elected to work 20 hours per week and most businesses don't seem to really care as long as the core work gets done.

Could be worth mentioning that load on porn servers correlates very nicely with US working hours...

US working hours are almost European downtime, mind you, so..

I know this because I was once in a position to be analyzing load on some mid-size porn servers; therefore I can also confirm that on these particular ones the Euro load was negligible. Also traffic was down in general on the weekends, which surprised me.

Also traffic was down in general on the weekends, which surprised me.

Not me. Stuff to do, time to go out, visit people etc.

Still, odd. I doubt that many people are looking at porn at work, it's probably more related to people out of the workforce..

If you look at produce in grocery stores, they tolerate some spoilage in order to make sure that they don't completely run out of any particular vegetable. It's difficult to predict exact sales of any particular fruit or vegetable and inconveniencing the consumer by running out loses more customers than passing on the cost savings of lower spoilage gains.

For some industries there could be a similar effect with labor, where having some slack in the system increases your ability to reliably meet tight deadlines and match peak demand. That reliability may be more valuable than the labor cost savings.

I’ve heard many of tech employees joke up 300k and 10 hrs a week during COVID.

Seems like Musks proved that was true.

This obviously has huge implications for inequality. Too reduce inequality, we have to reduce the rewards that high-income people get for their labor. But this will cause a large reduction in the hours worked by high skilled people and will cause a much larger decrease in GDP than the reduction in hours. By tolerating inequality, we can have a much higher level of economic output, and thus more money to be spent on social welfare programs. The costs to reduce inequality are very high indeed.

Or bigger families, more kids, etc. The robber baron fortunes dissolved so fast, in a few generations, because it was diluted rapidly due to large families, lavish personal spending, and philanthropic projects. Rich people, elites having fewer kids and delaying family formation probably contributes to rising inequality. Jeff Bezos' divorce for example cut his net worth a lot.

The robber baron fortunes dissolved so fast, in a few generations, because it was diluted rapidly due to large families, lavish personal spending, and philanthropic projects.

Did they? citation needed.

Carnegie' daughter and grandchildren all went on to occupy (and i suspect still do occupy) positions of wealth and power. The family of Henry Ford still own a controlling stake in Ford Motors. The upper ranks of the oil industry and east coast politics are both rife with Rockefellers, and JP Morgan is JP Morgan.

Thier wealth and influence is readily apperant today its just that they aren't the robber barons anymore the are the "old money". The folks sitting in the proverbial smoke filled rooms calling the shots for organizations with names like Ford, Cheveron, General Electric, and Chase Bank. Perhaps you may of heard of them.

the Vanderbilts completely blew their fortune. the Kennedy fortune has been diluted to almost nothing now.

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

worth just $6 billion. tiny compared to Forbes 50 wealth. The Ford Foundation only worth $16 billion. Also tiny.

I was talking about personal fortune in regard to the OP talking about wealth inequality. Not lineage, which will obviously outlast wealth.

In terms of influence, I think that too is overstated. How often do you hear about any of these old families in the news anymore? Soros and Gates, who earned their wealth, get way more coverage and have more influence. Just running a company is not the same as moving pieces on the political chessboard.

Kennedy wasn't a robber baron; he was a Prohibition-era bootlegger. And why would they want to be heard about in the news?

In addition to what @2rafa and @The_Nybbler said you seem to be operating under the impression that the philanthropic organizations established by the respective families represents the sum total of thier net worth. This is simply not the case. The Ford family fortune is not just the Ford Foundation, it is the Ford Foundation plus a 40% stake in Ford Motors, an NFL franchise, and the various other privately held assets of its members.

Likewise the wealth of the Rockefellers is not just the Rockefeller Foundation its the foundation plus owning Standard Oil Chevron and shit-tonne of prime Manhattan realesate.

That individual members of these dynasties may rank lower than guys like Bezos, Gates, or Musk, has less to do with the robber barons "squandering thier wealth" than it does simple longevity.

I say lets see what shape Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla are in after 100 years of operation before we assume that our current generation of industrialists are any smarter than thier predecessors.

True, but they donated and spent a lot too. Today's top tech billionaires hold on to their wealth much better it seems, but some billionaires have pledged to give away all fortune and leave none or little to kids. Also, the oil, rail, coal, industries faced major headwinds in the 20th century that I don't think big tech will suffer. The rise of highways hurt rail for example.

Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more.

"Facts" not in evidence. I suspect the only jobs where marginal productivity doesn't decline sharply with time worked are highly monitored, low intensity, repetitive ones, like warehouse worker or truck driver. Hence your inequality statement is backwards -- the people who get hurt most by shorter hours are already low paid.

The fewer hours worked, the larger proportion of your working time is overhead seems like a sensible observation. But it doesn't lend itself to any specific choice of what amount of overhead is acceptable. And there's also a trade-off of the more hours worked, the larger proportion of your working effectiveness is lost to fatigue. And both of those trade-offs likely vary widely job-to-job. And possibly in non-obvious ways, given that as a knowledge worker, my time "not working" regularly includes having some work problem in the back of my mind.

As far as I know high-intensity knowledge work like programming or data analysis gains huge boosts in productivity per hour if people work fewer hours and days. The other way to read that is that almost nobody can do this kind of work at full concentration for 8 hours straight but they will happily let you pay them for 8 hours.

This isn't entirely theoretical, there are European countries with more generous paid leave and lower unemployment rates that have much lower hours worked per worker. You can look at GDP per Capita per Hour Worked per worker and see how that correlates with productivity. Matt Brunieg has an old blog post comparing U.S. and the Nordics that suggests the relationship is relatively linear and they at least are able to work less hours per work and maintain comparable GDP/hour, and obviously there are tons of confounding variables. They do this by giving people long summer vacations rather than shorter work weeks

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/05/31/work-levels-in-the-us-and-nordic-countries/

Given the demographics of the Nordics (and the oil wealth in Norway), shouldn't we expect the Nordics to have a GDP/hour worked far in excess of the U.S.? The fact that they don't is interesting.

What if we only looked at U.S. workers of at least 25% Nordic descent and reran the comparison? I think we'd see Nordic-descended U.S. workers far outstripping their peers in Nordic countries in terms of GDP/hour worked.

I think we should always be careful using Nordic countries as comparisons. "Let's take a look at these high-IQ, ethnically homogenous, high-trust societies. Now compare them to the United States!".

Norway does outstrip the U.S. in GDP/hours worked because of oil, at least in the 2016 data.

If Danish Americans have higher productivity than Danes it could be due to American institutions and increasing marginal returns on hours worked. It could also be that Danish Americans, as members of a much larger society with a wider range of IQ's can primarily occupy managerial and technical roles, where a larger share of Danes in Denmark end up mopping floors, waiting tables and taking care of kids because there isn't a population of low IQ people to do it for them.

I'll grant the Nordics aren't a perfect comparison class but what country that has achieved a major reduction in hours per worker is? Just going off Wikipedia's Labor Productivity & average hours worked list Germany has a GDP per hour of 68.85 vs. the US's 73 but 1300 hours per worker vs. America's 1,765. The UK has a much lower GDP per capita 54.35 but much closer hours worked, 1670. France has 68.63 GDP/hour and 1514 Hours worked.

OP is proposing a highly non linear relationship between hours workers and productivity. No one has reduced hours worked to the 20 hour work week (~1000/year) but within the range of hours per worker we see internationally the countries with the fewest hours worked have pretty high productivity. If you assume there is even a linear relationship than Europe is a bunch of sleeping giants economically that could increase their GDP by 20% overnight by skipping summer vacation.

Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more.

This is not true, both in anecdote and data.

Data says they work about 3 hours per weak on average, but other data says that as much as 70% of their total work is business travel, lunches, seminars, trade shows, "meetings", etc.

EG: Not actually work at all.

This lines up with my one wagie experience where I got to know exactly what a couple suits were doing with their day, and it was mostly facebook and porn, except for the days where it was mostly spending company money on entertainment

Data says

Source? That seems quite extreme.

It's iffy shit; there is no way to actually get rock hard data on this because of the obvious reasons.

We do have their self reported hours several places (such as: https://executivetimeuse.org/ ; the Harvard BS survey, etc. ), which generally claim 55-60ish hours but include lunches, dinners, exercise, personal enrichment, golf, and etc. as hours worked.

You can find the breakdowns if you google around; the more financial elite vs cultural elite friendly the given institution is the less they actually publish about what 'hours worked' means.

This is wrong. Tell your average employee to do the same work in 75% of the time, and he'll get rid of some slack, maybe kick off some small client who isn't worth the trouble, so that in the end in dollar terms he will have produced 95 percent of the economic output in 75 percent of time. First to go are the least productive tasks.

When france passed the 35 hour work week, productivity increased. In the developed world , less hours worked is correlated with higher GDP per hour worked. Historically, working time fell while productivity increased. You’d have to explain Japan's abysmal productivity despite long hours, and europe’s ‘all else equal’ superior productivity to the US.

You're wrong, and that's fine, I'm pissed at the others more, who obliquely refer to and imply what I just said, without directly attacking your point. Are we too agreeable? Have we gone soft?

The employment regulation with regards to benefits for full time employees also creates a stagnant market. You’d imagine without these sorts of regulatory requirements on hours worked per week, there could be much more flexibility and experimentation with different working hours in different business types.

In my view the amount of hours needed per week should vary drastically by industry, but unfortunately that’s not possible because we’ve decided all full time work is 40 hours, period. This has massive switching costs for the economy and labor market especially.

So yesterday Turkish Presidential and Parliamentary elections took place. I wanted to give an overview of the main characters and themes.

First of all some clarifications about the election system and candidates.

The presidential system is relatively new in Turkey. Presidents used to be largely ceremonial in Turkey and the cabinet/prime minister were in charge until constitutional changes Erdogan himself advocated in 2017. This was only the second election where the country directly voted for a powerful president. Also, a new system of parliamentary alliances were implemented which allowed multiple parties to pool their votes in electoral alliances. The political system is only recently coming to terms with the full implications of this and we basically ended up with two broad coalitions. It is all too eerily American.

  • Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Good old Erdoğan. Doesn't need much of an introduction at this point. Has been leading the country with wildly different formal and informal coalitions since 2002. He is just 69yo but he has been getting visibly very old and fragile lately. It is likely he has some underlying health problems. Nevertheless he retains a lot of his charisma and political acumen. He entered politics as the energetic young face of the up-and-coming Islamist movement 30 years ago, and at this point the party is simply his personal fiefdom with little autonomous energy or appeal. He gathered in his electoral alliance a strange mix including the ultra-nationalist paramilitary party, old school Islamists, old school social democrats, and the political arm of Kurdish Hezbollah movement(!!) who basically want a loose federation with full autonomy for Kurds, united under Sharia. It doesn't make any sense and it is all held together thanks to his personality and patronage networks.

  • Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu: Very uncharismatic leader of opposition since 2010. He leads CHP, which is founded by Ataturk himself and used to be the ruling party during our single party dictatorship period of 1923-1950. He was a high level but unremarkable civil servant until he made a bid for Ankara mayoral elections in 2009, looked competent on TV, lost anyway, but then got elected as the chairman of the party when it turned out former chairman was sleeping with lots of women high up in the party. He has since lost every single election with roughly the same percentage of the votes CHP always receives (around 20-25%). However the laws regulating political party administration in Turkey basically makes it impossible to remove the party chairman unless they really fuck up, so he has simply refused to leave. He is also from the small Shia religious minority of Eastern Turkey, and moved the party to a more left-liberal inclusive direction compared to the hardcore-nationalist-secularist-pro-army position it used to have. He leads an electoral alliance of a fuck-ton of parties, including many supporting it from outside. This group includes another branch of the ultra-nationalist paramilitary party, the main Kurdish socialist party (political wing of the guerrilla movement), another branch of old school Islamists, former Erdogan allies (his former economics/foreign ministers and prime minister, one of them a pro-EU neoliberal, one of them a hardcore neo-Ottomanist), and a bunch of smaller liberal or socialist or nationalist parties. It doesn't make any sense and it is all held together thanks to a hatred of Erdoğan's personality and patronage networks.

  • Sinan Oğan: Another branch of ultra-nationalist paramilitary party (!!), organized as more of a protest candidate against the massive refugee waves Turkey has experienced in the last decade. We received around 5-10 million Syrian/Afghan/African and who knows what else refugees and migrants since 2010. This is very unprecedented and many larger cities became somewhat multicultural hotchpotches almost overnight. There is tremendous amount of resentment against this development so it was enough to fuel a third candidate. He is essentially a pro-Eurasianist academic who speaks fluent Russian and was very likely recruited by the intelligence services to liaison with Central Asian Turkic Republics in the 90s when Turkey had hegemonic ambitions in the region. Pretty much any high-up member of ultra-nationalist paramilitary party can be assumed to have shady ties with the intelligence services/deep state.

There is another candidate who was mostly just running over a personal grudge and withdrew before the elections so I will not mention him.

The important issues of the election were (with a vague order of importance):

  • Erdoğan: Love him or hate him. There is not much of a middle ground at this point.

  • Economy: Turkey got solidly caught in the middle income trap after a period of solid neo-liberal growth. Inflation is rampant, current is in shambles, and inequality is going through the roof as the government practices wage suppression to a keep trade balance discipline, and low interest rates are sky-rocketing the real estate prices. The opposition parties focused much of their effort convincing the people that they can salvage the situation.

  • Immigration: Immigration is almost universally disliked. Massive majorities express that they want them gone ASAP in polls. Erdoğan's pro-refuge stance is the main factor keeping this issue under control. Almost all opposition figures made remarks about "solving" this crisis but there doesn't seem to be any good policy proposals, especially if Turkey wants to keep some cooperative relation with the EU.

  • Geopolitics: Middle East has always been a dangerous place but the sense of instability and vulnerability is increasing substantially nowadays. Turkey's domestic defense industry has been growing rapidly in order to wean off the NATO dependence in foreign policy and this stuff is wildly popular with basically everyone. Erdoğa does well to take credit.

  • Secularity/Western Identity: Always the underlying issue of every other issue in Turkey is this identity crisis. The state has ideologically become solidly moderate conservative under Erdoğan, however it is not capable of producing any real modern alternatives to secularist modernism and nationalist modernism, capable of going beyond politics of resentment against the Westernized elites and become a creative force for the future. This has led to the rapidly rising forces of the ultra-nationalist bloc as well as Kurdish identity politics and Western woke ideology as everyone is aware that the country is stuck, but cannot produce a home-bread alternative. This is all happening with the background of a century of rapid transition that made the country today almost entirely urban, capitalist and social media addicted with a TFR below replacement as of last year.

Business conglomerates friendly with Erdoğan's family took over almost all the private media enterprise in the country in the last decade, and the opposition parties created their own rather amateurish but widely watched alternatives. The public media also acts like an arm of the ruling party. Therefore watching the election coverage and zapping between channels gives you an impression of two parallel universes vaguely aware of each other.

The polling was suggesting prior to the election that Erdoğan would face a big loss, getting solidly defeated in the first round with a large margin even. Therefore the opposition was extremely hopeful, almost in a messianic mood for weeks at this point. However the results were solidly very disappointing if that was what you were hoping for. It looks like it ended roughly 49.5/45/5.5% between the candidates with a small number of ballot boxes still contested with re-counts. I don't expect any changes. There will be a second round but Erdogan's victory is basically guaranteed as nobody expects a principled block voting of Sinan Oğan's supporters in favor of Kılıçdaroğlu. The mood is extremely catastrophic in the Western facing part of the population (which is roughly everyone I know), and there are a fair number of bitter losers with fraud claims (I don't believe any widespread fraud has ever taken place in modern Turkish elections. I volunteered in the past and know the system well and it is quite solid).

This is the day we all woke up today. I moved abroad a while ago and purposefully lowered my emotional attachment with the country and looks like that was definitely the right decision. Still couldn't help but feel solid disappointment watching the results roll on TV yesterday, even though I was very hesitant to vote for such a shitty opposition bloc.

Edit: Forgot to mention, Erdogan's block won a parliamentary majority pretty easily. So even if the opposition wins the Presidency through a miracle there will be a split government situation which is something very unfamiliar to Turkish people. We used to have a lot of unstable coalition governments in the 90s and people absolutely hated them and generally prefer consistent alignments in the government.

Are there any Gulenists left in Turkish politics? Last time I was paying attention (IIRC around 2012), it sounded like the key battle-lines were Erdogan vs. the Gulenists with the Kemalists basically out of contention, but it sounds like Kılıçdaroğlu is a Kemalist straight out of central casting.

Nope they got purged the fuck out. There weren’t many to begin with. They were just very powerful in media judiciary education and bureaucracy since they acted as Erdoğan’s intellectual shock troops to take over complex institutions. Islamist movement has very low human capital so this is something they always struggled it. When they were purged they were replaced either with some sections of the old Kemalist guard or people from party patronage networks.

it sounds like Kılıçdaroğlu is a Kemalist straight out of central casting

The label Kemalist lost its meaning other than “broadly secular” at this point. There isn’t anyone significant who would like a return to the rule of NATO aligned heavily statist army-bureaucracy network which is what Kemalism used to mean in the 2000s.

Almost all opposition figures made remarks about "solving" this crisis but there doesn't seem to be any good policy proposals, especially if Turkey wants to keep some cooperative relation with the EU.

Mass deportations to their home countries will have tremendous support from EU. There will be some pearl clutching and a couple of true believers may even be sincere. But there will be serious silent support.

Anyway I hope for secularists to win. I don't think that Turkey can endure couple of more years of Erdogan's policy.

I think the EU is quite happy with Turkey’s role as a deportation target for Syrians that cannot be sent back to Syria (because Assad must go or stg). Many of these people have been in the country for close to 10 years at this point and it’s not obvious if Syria would even accept them back.

I think mass deportation is still a possible solution for more recent arrivals of Afghans and Africans, however it is very doubtful if Turkey has the state capacity for such a thing or even the will. The reality is, immigrations of non-Turkish Muslim groups into Anatolia is a very common occurrence (probably the majority of the modern “Turkish” population are descendants of such immigrations) in late Ottoman history and state has been pretty successful at assimilating them into a broad Turkish identity. My best guess is that something like this will happen in the 21st century too.

OTOH a botched attempt to get the refugees out might result to them pouring to Europe instead and cause EU to crap its collective pants.

Turkish Presidential

As usual, any news from turkey is bad news, whether it's earthquakes, NATO, Syria, Kurds, political unrest, bad election results, and so on . It's currency keeps falling against the dollar, it stock market keeps falling too. Same as from 2013-2021. Same shit as always.

It goes to show how whatever problems the US has, are worse elsewhere. America's political problems does not cause its stock market to fall or currency to crash, unlike in Tukey , Brazil, or elsewhere. It's like this with most countries...nothing but bad news that makes America's problems seem quaint by comparison.

Perhaps you only hear of the bad news? The Turkish stock market (BIST 100) did an absolute rally since 2022, and the currency has stabilized in the last 6 months as well (consistent small devaluations don't hurt the real economy much if they are predictable). A semi-independent posture from NATO is seen as a positive in the country. The country is preparing to normalize relations with Syria since their civil war is over (although they still have to keep starving because the EU and the US wants to "punish" Assad or something).

nothing but bad news that makes America's problems seem quaint by comparison

If you are rich you can sustain a lot more ruin in the Adam Smith sense. The Culture War threads here are 90% dedicated to absolute ridiculous bullshit that Americans produce and sustain constantly thanks to their wealth after all.

There is quite a lot more to life than politics and many people find happiness and meaning in their lives even while living in a country that is not materially ideal. You can do a lot worse than Brazil or Turkey as places to lead a life.

2022 was an outlier, which is why I said 2010-2021. since 2013 it seems all downhill...it's just all bad it seems: coup, sectarian violence, hyperinflation , etc. Turkey needs two things: significant capital inflows and high tech industry.

Do you reckon Zafer Party will be able to come to some kind of agreement with KK?

No clue. It’s still up in the air. Everyone was falling over themselves to have a phone call with Oğan last night. My expectations:

  1. Erdoğan will almost definitely win regardless, which means Oğan can get some actual power in exchange of support. Opposition promises are as good as worthless.

  2. Opposition block includes the support of the Kurdish independence movement. I doubt how many of his voters would follow him if he came to an agreement with KK.

I was talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Cause_Party

Their name (HÜDA PAR = Allah Party using one of the many names of Allah) is a bit of a pun on Hezbollah which simply means Party of God.

The state in the past has used them from time to time for dirty urban contra-guerilla stuff against the Kurdish movement. Members of the state security establishment sometimes tacitly acknowledges that Islam is what really binds Kurds to Turkey, and without Islam there is nothing other than brute force that can keep them loyal. Therefore sometimes extreme groups such as this are tolerated.

Despite his current nationalist bend, Erdogan is the first mainstream politician that broke a great many taboos with regards to Kurds in Turkey, and he typically polls very strong in Kurdish regions, successfully rivaling the Kurdish independence movement especially among the more religious Kurds.

Economy: Turkey got solidly caught in the middle income trap after a period of solid neo-liberal growth. Inflation is rampant, current is in shambles, and inequality is going through the roof as the government practices wage suppression to a keep trade balance discipline, and low interest rates are sky-rocketing the real estate prices. The opposition parties focused much of their effort convincing the people that they can salvage the situation.

The good news is that pretty decent quality Turkish made pistols have never been more affordable. Seriously, I picked up a forged frame 1911a1 clone for $300. And you can get reliable polymer framed guns for about the same. There's even some HiPower clones for $500-600. I've also heard that there will be a 2011 for less than $1k soon.

Lol. I don’t know anything about guns but good to know. A lot of the inflation is definitely primarily meant to keep the export industry and employment strong at the expense of the middle class purchasing power

I alternate between hearing this and hearing that Turkish guns (mostly shotguns) are crap. I’ve already my 1911 but I can’t deny that a 2011 is appealing!

I always hear Turkish shotguns are crap but I have no direct experience.

I don't think you'll find anyone saying Turkish pistols are crap. The fact is they're easily as good as anything Rock Island or Springfield are putting out in the mid or low range.

I keep thinking about picking up a HiPower clone, it seems really fun to have both major Browning designs.

Any Turkish ammunition production available in the US?

Yes, and do not purchase it.

The quality control is horrendous.

I am in the middle of breaking down 5000 rounds of questionable Turkish 9x19 for the primed brass and bullets.

Good to know, thanks.

I remember reading a long time ago that as a democratically supported populist Erdogen always faced push back for bureaucracy and basically the PMC. Any time he tried to keep them in line and enforce his Democratic backing he came off authoritarian. And this is the way of all populists who always end up fighting the PMC and that fight always comes off unnatural. Same as Trump being investigated even before being elected by the fbi. The constant bureaucratic roadblocks makes a guy look authoritarian while they appear organic. Also same with Desantis attacks on DEI in universities - top down but Democratic control over organic PMC action.

Therefore, I support Erdogen. Not even 100% sure why but he feels like a natural ally. It feels like Trump versus Biden and I’m not voting for Biden. Also when the west does need something it seems like Erdogen always falls in line and helps.

Therefore, I support Erdogen.

Dude embezzled funds for earthquake victims and shut down social media when people started talking about it.

I hate being the “source” guy, but I googled your claim and got nothing. That’s a big claim so I believe you need to back it up. The only thing I got is a cell phone tax they claim went to pay IMF loans and general government expenses. That would not be embezzlement.

There are a couple in German: 1, 2. Automatic translation from German into English is usually quite good.

I don’t believe the articles are describing “embezzle” which in the usage Im familiar with involved taking public funds and putting them directly into your pocket.

These articles describe using earthquake money for general government money. Which is of course quite common and the US does that all the time and every day.

The article cites a journalist called Mumay claiming that a fake address was used to channel earthquake relief funds to one Ensar foundation "close to Erdogan". I am not sure exactly what is being claimed here, maybe @Pasha knows more?

It wouldn't surprise me much. NGOs which are mostly actually just funded by various government funds and have a political purpose next to their regular work has been a common thing in Erdogan's "patronage networks" I have been mentioning. As far as I know this one mostly builds and runs university student housing and does some relief work, typically with a religious tone. It is a method for offloading government responsibilities to institutions which can be more selective in the ideological and political constitution of their members, as opposed to regular civil servants who are more or less the average of the country by definition.

This should sound rather familiar to anyone who knows how the Western NGOs function. It is of course less professional and more embezzlement-y.

Maybe I can clarify what you are trying to say here. After the absolute devastation of the 1999 İzmit Earthquake, there was a significant civic and political push in Turkey for rapid urban renewal in order to make the cities more robust against future earthquakes and also to have decent rescue and relief organizations. The governments of the time imposed earmarked taxation for earthquake funds, which were supposed to be used for, well earthquake stuff. But the truth is there was nothing in the laws that actually forced the government to use this money for anything specifically. It was a Parliamentary democracy, money goes where the budget voted by the Parliament of the time wants it to go. So a lot of these funds got used in much more popular (people forget fast) infrastructure projects or just general spending. So it is a form of misusing funds, but embezzlement is a bit strong. I am sure there was some embezzlement somewhere but that is always the case with any government fund.

Also I am not sure what you are talking about with shutting down the social media.

Two things can be true: Turkish "democracy" may have always been democracy-with-an-asterisk. That asterisk being a Kemalist deep state willing to overthrow and jail opponents (like Erdogan) for being insufficiently secular. So a pretty big one.

Erdogan may be their chickens coming home to roost - hard to make the moral case for democratic restraint when the deep state and some of the more liberal Turks were fine with illiberalism to maintain their preferred status quo against the broadly Islamist populace (similarly, "liberals" in Egypt reacted...badly to Morsi).

But that doesn't mean that Erdogan isn't an autocrat now or that he's good for Turkey.

Yes this is pretty much spot on. One man increasingly making almost every single decision and taking personal control of almost every patronage network in a diverse country of ~80 million for 25 years has had quite disastrous consequences no matter what one thinks about his opponents.

Ironically, his main victim has been the center-right/conservative/Islamist-ish* political movements. He totally hollowed the organizations out and blocked the paths of succession for talented people in favor of his own syncopates.

*always good to keep in mind there are very few Islamists in Turkey in the Salafist sense, and these people typically consider Erdogan also an absolute degenerate enemy of the true faith.

*always good to keep in mind there are very few Islamists in Turkey in the Salafist sense, and these people typically consider Erdogan also an absolute degenerate enemy of the true faith.

I meant it in a much broader sense: relative to laicite especially, so many Muslims would count as "Islamist" . They don't actually have to be a crazy Salafist type or even the state-opposing Muslim Brotherhood types.

TBH the whole term is a fraught one, partly because it's a tempting way for Westerners to criticize Muslims while claiming to not criticize Islam-as-such, and to apply Protestant assumptions to Islam - obviously the "right" sort of Islam wouldn't be so politically problematic (even though a lot of inconvenient things in Islam are just part of general doctrine).

Erdogan's magic with regards to Islamism was to take over the Muslim Brotherhood type Milli Görüş movement which was making large sections of the population as well as the elite rather uncomfortable at the time, and merge it with the more folksy traditional Islam of the population, liberal pro-EU currents, as well as the dominant center-right capitalist developmentalist tradition of Turkish politics.

Later on he did one more pivot and moved to a type of Islam that the rulers of the Ottoman Empire would be very familiar with, where protecting the religion is the source of the state's legitimacy, and in exchange the state gets the power to define what religion means. This could take on very radical forms, as even implementing laicite can be an act of upholding the religion if the state determines this is what it will take to protect the community of believers(Obligatory photo of Ataturk praying with the muftis and imams at the opening of the first Parliament of Ankara). After all, what does Islam even mean if the Muslims are not strong enough to keep existing? Currently this is what Erdogan-style Islamism ended up transforming into. However the problem with such a model is that it is also quite despotic and spiritually empty, which are two problems Ottomans also often struggled with.

Not even 100% sure why but he feels like a natural ally

I suspect because you don't know much about the topic and just project your own prejudices on him.

This is amusing given Israel’s demographic future is economically catastrophic (shrinking populations are bad, but producing vastly more welfare recipients is perhaps even worse),

Perhaps, but what happens when you can't afford to provide for those welfare recipients? They cease to be welfare recipients. And in that case they are again a national resource, whereas a future where they instead don't exist that resource is not there to be tapped.

Or the productive people increasingly leave as the country enters a death spiral.

I'm not sure that's worse than demographic decline.

Demographic decline in what sense? Korea is in a bad place but Japan will probably be fine. Obviously AI timelines will shake things up anyway, and Japanese debt is largely held domestically.

And high savings rates seem to be mitigating the problem in Japan.

Israel might well do a better job of managing that transition than Argentina or South Africa, it’s true. On the other hand, they might not.

Israel has the disadvantage of being surrounded by hostile neighbors though. I can't imagine downscaling the economy is a good idea in that situation.

shrinking populations are bad, but producing vastly more welfare recipients is perhaps even worse

Shrinking population produce a lot of welfare recipients. These are typically called “retirees”. Unlike the young welfare recipients, the retirees cannot be made to work very effectively.

Do they literally do nothing? Why do they get welfare? Surely they would be okay working in ultra-orthodox kosher food factories or something?

So what made the prior generations of Jews to put down their Talmud’s and join society?

If modern society leads to low tfr it would seem beneficial to have a 6-7 tfr isolated community that occasional dumps a bunch of their people into broader society.

What is so interesting about the Talmud? I kind of want to read it if some of the smartest people in the world continuously devote their lives to reading it.

So what made the prior generations of Jews to put down their Talmud’s and join society?

Socialism. Well, at least in many cases.

Hindu and Buddhist scholars have spent thousands of years studying their own ancient texts, to much the same outcome. You could spend a lifetime studying The Lord of the Rings.

You're selling your people a bit short here. Reading Orthodox Jewish commentaries really does feel like "big-brain shit" in a way that say, reading Christian commentaries doesn't.

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So what made the prior generations of Jews to put down their Talmud’s and join society?

They didn't have a welfare state to exploit. They may have been zealots (so to speak) but they weren't going to starve just to study the Talmud.

Probably a ridiculous percentage of the world’s population above IQ 160 is currently engaged in studying Halakhic law in dingy East Jerusalem Kollels

Dread it, run from it, autism arrives all the same.

Probably a ridiculous percentage of the world’s population above IQ 160 is currently engaged in studying Halakhic law in dingy East Jerusalem Kollels

To be honest this strikes me as a good thing in a way. Another ridiculous percentage of the world’s population above IQ 160 is currently engaged in absolute useless or harmful rat races in academia/law/finance/tech and making 1.2 children per women. At least some hidden geniuses are busy pumping out 10 children per family and providing the genius pool of the future.

the ultra orthodox, like the Amish, grow unabated.

Kiryas Joel, the poorest city in the US.

Can't point to hard data, but as I lived through 2000s and 2010s in Turkey I can definitely say people had quite a lot of optimism about the future roughly between 2005-2015. Combination of strong economic growth as well as a positive ideological framework for the future changes (increasing liberalism and EU membership in our case) can really work some serious magic.

Both of factors basically disappeared since in most of the world. Few countries have experienced significant consistent economic growth in the last decade (China, US and Israel as exceptions), let alone productivity growth. Also neo-liberal borderless capitalism and almost limitless human liberty through internet does not function as the great ideology of the age as it used to anymore. The economic crash killed the belief in the first and the Arab Spring in the second.

Both of factors basically disappeared since in most of the world. Few countries have experienced significant consistent economic growth in the last decade (China, US and Israel as exceptions), let alone productivity growth. Also neo-liberal borderless capitalism and almost limitless human liberty through internet does not function as the great ideology of the age as it used to anymore. The economic crash killed the belief in the first and the Arab Spring in the second.

Yup. Ex-US market have lagged big time since since 2010, such as in terms of stock market gains, GDP, innovation, etc. See no reason for this to improve. 2002-2010 was an outlier that will likely not be repeated. It does also call into doubt the Keynesian assumption that you can print your way to prosperity; except for the US, this has failed.

Yes looks like the system is quite stuck and individual small countries are also stuck playing a game which is not working well for them anymore. I found Michael Pettis' work quite enlightening and interesting in this subject: https://americancompass.org/bad-trade and also the theories that relate developmental stall to deindustrialization https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development. I believe the two ideas work well together to explain quite a lot. But I am not an economist.

Ex-big tech has lagged. If you look at the same kind of stocks in other indexes - banks, cyclicals, etc the US has not done that well.

It’s something something quit enforcing monopoly laws allowing big tech to capture economic rents and develop market caps never seen before.

Networks effects and moats. These cannot be fixed with regulation but are intrinsic to the type of technology . Having total market dominance is not the same as uncompetitive behavior.

Even in the US, the macroeconomic policies of the 2010s were closer to monetarism than Keynesianism. Obama brought down the defict, the Fed kept broad money and nominal GDP growing at a very steady rate, and the economy did ok in spite of greater regulatory/tax burdens during than e.g. the 1990s boom.

In terms of growth, there has been a general movement in the developed world away from economic freedom since about 2000, and I don't think there's much to be explained once this + demographics are accounted for. The crises of the 1970s and 1980s temporarily made it politically profitable for politicians to pursue pro-growth policies, in spite of the fact that these tend to go against well-organised special interest groups, but once this had suceeded, the tendencies identified by public choice theory reasserted themselves: more taxes, more spending, and more regulation. Leviathan went on a crash diet, but he's now gorging again, and the consequence is stagnation, especially in the hyper-cautious and social democratic world of the EU, which has seen more or less no per capita GDP growth since 2007.

East Asian counties at least have a lot of smart people and seem to utilize cognitive capital well, maybe also Nordic countries in this regard too and Israel. .. the same cannot be said elsewhere. the brain drain problem , dysgenics/low-iq problem is real.

Not to be outdone by Bud Lite, Miller Lite has apparently been running their own "woke" beer advertisements: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_NtBQWZqaHo

IMO the campaign here is actually clever, take this "bad" thing, use money to buy it, and turn it into a "good" thing. Whoever came up with this idea: cool idea.

But here's my question: is any of this old "bad" stuff actually bad? Let's look at contemporary things like onlyfans, instagram, tiktok, the hundreds of reddit 'gonewild' type porn forums, etc. It seems to me that many women, given the chance, enjoy wearing bikinis, being sexualized, being lusted after etc. Not all women, obviously, since some women don't like this, but...isn't this trying to strip the pro-sexualization women of their agency?

Aside from that, isn't Miller saying that women belong...in the kitchen? Don't go out to the beach and get drunk and have fun. Wear modest clothing (like the person in the ad), stay inside in the dark, and make things for people to eat.

Also: the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihenstephan_Abbey?useskin=vector

Trappist ales were the first thing I thought of in response to the claim that women were the original brewers of beer.

Also that fermented grain drinks arose in every culture with access to grain, and that it sourcing the original beer brewer would be as impossible as figuring out who baked the first loaf of bread.

Yeah, my first thought was "even if it were true...so what?"

Like, we're not talking about some segregated modern job that can easily be tracked and we know it was mainly men did advanced mathematics until recently.

It was one form of manual work in a very different environment that didn't have those sharp lines. Why would I be surprised or blown away in any way by the idea that women allegedly worked in it as well?

I think their narrative is meant to be something like the following:

Ever since the very beginning of history up until the Founding of America, women have always been brewing beer. Girl power!

But then, men took this from women! At some unspecified time and in some unspecified fashion, they took all the respectable jobs of growing and brewing, and stripped the women down to use them as mere advertisements.

But now, Miller Lite is undoing all that! They're putting women back in charge (where they belong) and erasing and defacing the artifacts of the previous perverted period. Girl power!

So the reason why general-you is being asked to care about this is because bad things have been done, and now Miller Lite is undoing the badness and restoring the industry to its natural state, and they want you to help. They're not just making the point that "women have long been involved in the beer industries", they're advocating for rolling back the clock on the misdeeds of the recent past and retvrning to the alleged tradition of having women in charge. In that regard, it's quite a reactionary ad.

I mean, if they really wanted to go with the women and early beer angle, they'd have a Mesopotamian-dressed queen drinking from a golden straw.

I still wouldn't buy Miller Lite, but props for effort would be in order.

It's all so exhausting. Does society really need to take a moment out of all its other reckonings to examine the ethics of light beer? It's poison that makes us fat, we should drink less of it but won't. Just for once I'd like a bipartisan push back rather than the two sides predictably being turned against each other at the behest of corporate ghouls.

Ab, Miller, ect. You make heaps of money to psyop people into buying poison, you do not have any possible position of moral high ground to lecture us.

I thought the ad was interesting, but do not like lite beers, or hoppy beers, and still do not want to go buy Miller Lite, nor do I condone focusing on hops. Aesthetically, I would be happier if they focused more on grains, but I understand that, logistically, a bunch of paper compost won't go very far in farming grains.

Plausibly there are a decent number of women who like showing off their bodies, bikinis, and so on, but dislike a media environment saturated in even hotter, photoshopped women for them to compare themselves to. There has been a big backlash about that over the past several years. It's "bad sh*t" from a female point of view because it makes average women look unattractive in comparison. If a woman puts on a bikini in a culture that's moving from more conservative mores to more liberal ones, it's great if she can get a lot of attention for how daring she is. She probably can't regularly drink more than one or two beers and still look good, though, so she isn't really the target audience of cheap beer ads. It's frustrating if she is expected to look sexy, in a culture moving from more liberal to more conservative mores -- if she looks great, she'll be a bit less attractive than the advertisement behind her, or if she doesn't, she'll be looked down on as frumpy. Maybe the norm is to only sell bikinis, and she has to buy one or face a steep price hike and inconvenience ordering something from a more niche brand, but she's fat or older, and feels awkward and ugly in it.

The woman in the ad is wearing a rather short, tight skirt -- women can be a bit sexy, nobody wants to go full burqa, but she's not sexier than the viewer. Nor is she more conservative than the viewer. The viewer would be in a fair competition with her. A woman who wants to stand out as unusually attractive would like the media women to be in overalls and sweatshirts, for contrast.

They're also having it both ways -- showing the bikini models to get attention, while decrying them as bad sh*t. Encouraging their male audience members to take a look at their older advertisements in order to send them in.

It's "bad sh*t" from a female point of view because it makes average women look unattractive in comparison.

If women stated that the issue was avoiding runaway intrasexual competition it'd be one thing.

But that's not what they say. They say it's bad as such, immoral. Some feminists will even draw a line between this "objectification" and actual violence.

Well that's a silly way to look at it: in the long term, almost every woman (and man's) worth is in their offspring, their children. Only few exceptional people will have another, greater, impact on the world than their children.

Women (or some women, rather) don’t oppose these ads because they’re worried men will realize hotter women are out there (that much is as obvious even if one enforces the hijab).

Men also know that height is an advantage and there's always someone hotter. But enough also seem to be reliably triggered enough at seeing Stacy on a Youtube channel saying she won't date a 5'11 man to actually make harnessing their resentment a viable business model for people.

These women also obviously knew that models were much fitter. Apparently them flaunting it still didn't play well.

Making intrasexual competition - or someone's allegedly lower place in the rankings - more salient seems to cause some people to get demoralized, resentful or to try to lash out and control the message. The same basic argument against social media status games in general tbh.

They opposed them because being constantly reminded that one’s primary worth as a woman is in being sexy on a billboard while driving to work or taking the subway every day can be demoralizing or just kind of sad.

Okay. Then this theory predicts that this'll stop being an issue when the...I dunno, female objectification waterline is brought down to that of males.

I'm not convinced that's going to happen though. As I said: people have an ideological belief that "objectification" is wrong as such. Both ScarJo and Chris Hemsworth were sexified for money (knowing absolutely full well what they were doing), only one of them complains because of little kids will see it*. Such things gain a life of their own. For another, it's a very useful argument. There'll always be people of the sort I describe above. Not sure why they'd put aside a tool.

* Even though Hemsworth's ridiculous use of steroids and refusal to admit it is arguably worse for body image issues due to how little it's interrogated in comparison and how bad the potential health risks of taking these drugs are.

I'd be happier with billboards reminding women their primary worth is as wives and mothers.

I'd think being sexy would be less demoralizing than than a PowerPoint / email job billboard but I'm not a woman. Maybe women really identify with Cathy. Ack!

I'd be happier with billboards reminding women their primary worth is as wives and mothers.

Which would very obviously prove to be even more triggering.

Trying to pander to women's desire to feel empowered and justified by doing whatever they decide to do is a losing game.

That was mostly conjecture.

The ad is to some extent an exploration of the question: what if men don't buy cheap beer so much more than women because men in general actually prefer the product more than women, but because they have been marketed to so hard? What if women were pandered to as much as men? Would they be willing to buy cheap beer product, instead of having to make actually different products? This is the main kind of pandering they could come up with, and it's much cheaper than changing the taste or even packaging significantly.

I don't actually know what Miller Lite tastes like, because I'm so certain it isn't for me, I've never actually tried it. If someone poured it in a glass and called it a beer flavored soda, who knows, maybe I would like it? Or at least not dislike it? But I won't try that out, and will continue just buying pre-mixed margarita in the spring and summer, Octoberfest beers in the fall, and mulled wine in the winter. They probably aren't wrong that they have an image problem as much as a taste problem among women and other people who find bikini clad models tasteless. I'm not offended, exactly, it isn't a question of morality, I just know with complete certainty that it isn't the sort of drink people like me choose, and have no reason to choose it, since by all accounts it doesn't taste like much.

Yes, I doubt it will work. Fruity seltzers are a much easier sell.

will continue just buying pre-mixed margarita

Dude.... that's legitimately disgusting. mixing a proper margarita is no harder than warming up mulled wine and significantly better. As far as having never tried a lite beer, are they just not at gatherings you go to? grab one, they're not great but alright and incredibly interchangeable.

In addition to nostalgia, I like that my husband thinks it's disgusting, so it's still there when I want a drink.

I think I have, but a different brand. It seemed drinkable, but not an improvement on soda, or even iced tea.

If women stated that the issue was avoiding runaway intrasexual competition it'd be one thing.

"Ban this ad because other women are hotter than me" is not a sentiment that any woman wants to admit to others or herself, a'la cognitive dissonance. To out yourself as an uggo is to lower your own social status, so I can't really begrudge women for not making that argument any more than I begrudge myself for not making the argument that all gyms should be banned so fewer guys are buffer than me so I can get more chicks. I would like it if they were but I can't make the argument.

We can nevertheless infer that this is their true motive by mapping out their incentive structures.

And yet men are perfectly happy with ordinary non-hyperstimulating women, in a stark contrast with the preferences of your sex to whom only relative desirability matters. As always, the world is ending, women most affected.

I can't really begrudge women for not making that argument any more than I begrudge myself for not making the argument that all gyms should be banned so fewer guys are buffer than me so I can get more chicks. I would like it if they were but I can't make the argument.

But are you making the argument that gyms should be banned because of toxic masculinity or [insert made-up argument]? If so, that's unethical, if not, the comparison doesn't work out.

So many kneejerk reactions to this ad.

I mean for starters, they censored all the faces of the pinup girls? Like they are in witness protection or some shit? It puts off strong Orwellian vibes that even as they are attempting to censor the past by buying up as much material as they can and destroying it, they have to censor even their request to further censor too?

And then there is the blatant destruction of history. I get it, it's beer pinup memorabilia. It's not The Iliad or Animal Farm. But it's still a part of culture, and seeing this active campaign to gather and destroy it is still remarkably offputting. It's not a practice I want out there being done in any context, lest it catch on the same way all the other obscene year zero impulses we've seen have caught on.

Edit: Is this even a real thing? It's an unlisted video, only has 2m views, was published March 7th, so before Bud's fiasco. Everything about this feels so artificial now that I look closer.

I get the feeling that there’s an idea out there that’s something like, “sexually arousing content can only be ethically consumed on direct license from the content creator.” OnlyFans, Instagram, TikTok, GoneWild, etc. are all okay because the model is giving her direct consent for everyone to look at her by posting on her own personal account. This gives her a sense of agency that pin-up girls posing for beer ads lack.

I was going to critique your argument on the grounds that it is still not okay if we take some feminists views on objectification - which allegedly inculcates men with problematic and potentially violent ideas and, as 2rafa is arguing, may also send demoralizing messages to women.

But, I mean, the more obvious criticism is that it just doesn't seem like there's that sharp a distinction. The pin-up girl is also licensing her likeness - and it'd take a fool to not know why. She is simply using someone else's platform to spread that likeness. But then again, so is the person on Onlyfans, in a sense.

That isn't even getting into the fact that there's nothing saying the Onlyfans model inherently has more agency. She could be one of the unfortunate masses making Uber-level money for objectifying herself far worse than the model does. But she doesn't even get to blame some shady porn exec for upselling/coercing her into it. We also know that that also happens in OF because even some of the wealthiest girls in the game claim to be involved in abusive relationships that forced them to work

This is just about the worst link you could have attached to support your argument because Amouranth is extremely obviously fabricating her husband's "abuse" to facilitate more simp donations.

Indeed, you're on to a losing battle whenever you claim that we can "know" (justified true belief) that something is happening based on the evidence of an lewd streamer's Twitter self-reporting.

Perhaps they did not want you to notice that Megan Markle, Pamela Anderson, and Sofia Vergara were in the ads. These women still have quite a bit of cachet, so it is embarrassing to be pulping their images. For example, here is a post from one day ago of bikini pictures of Ms. Vergara. The people in the ads are still mainstream stars. Selling products is how stars make their money.

Also: the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong

For most of history beer was generally home-brewed, and in those instances it was indeed produced primarily by women.

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

Commercially brewed beer has been a predominantly male occupation for about 500 years. Basically, since the time where it was something a modern person would drink and recognize as beer.

Because as soon as something become profitable, men take it over and pretend women didn't contribute anything.

To be more precise, people who are willing to take big risks on obtaining status through commerce, who tend to be from a small minority of men, undertake the big risks involved in making things profitable and marketing them on a large scale, and tend to ignore or forget about earlier contributions, many (and sometimes most) of which were made by women.

Historically, when women e.g. had to worry about bleeding part of the month, being raped by a random stranger on a highway, having to raise enough children to fund their old ages despite the high levels of child mortalituy, as well as a host of legal inequalities, this gendered pattern was particularly prominent. See the history of textiles. Even today, AFAIK, women in business tend towards relatively stable but unprofitable businesses like baking, rather than sink-or-swim forms of enterprise that offer the possibility of huge success and the probability of large opportunity costs or even bankrupcy.

The ad didn't split the hairs you're trying to split.

On the other hand sending out named promotional cans to influencers (or whatever it was) on their special occasions and having one of them be a progressive transwoman who used it to advertise Bud Light to her own audience (which I would guess includes zero conservatives) because Anheuser-Busch wants young progressives to drink bud light seems like a relatively weak reason to start a boycott

Did you not see the video(sorry for fox link, it's getting harder lately to find controversial videos on YouTube that aren't reactions to reactions) of the executive saying they wanted to move away from their current customer base? If you don't respond to a company literally insulting you then I think you're ready to just lay down and die.

"Bud Light is throwing their weight behind the idea that a natural born man can transition into a woman - an idea that is harmful in its consequences, disrespectful to reality, and is quite possibly the most ridiculous development in our political arena in ways I could have never foreseen."

If you believe the above, I think this is a decent enough reason to boycott? This isn't an argument over some sprawling, poorly-understood topic like the pros/cons of taxes or immigration policy. This is more like a company telling you that the color green is no different from red, without a trace of winking, Millenial irony attached, except worse given the subject matter.

Some hack writer burning a Trump effigy in his show is dumb, but mostly just eyeroll-inducing. The psychology behind such a person and their behavior is completely legible to me, even if it's idiotic. But for trans issues, it does feel like many on the left are downloading their views from a heretofore undiscovered alien planet. I can break bread with or let bygones be bygones to some extent with somebody who really likes socialism. It is increasingly difficult to do so with people who are being absurd on an even more fundamental level - if not the most.

The Bud/Mulvaney controversy was likely sprung from a critical mass of people already predisposed towards being unfavorable having an "Oh, come the fuck on" moment, particularly attenuated by having this come from Bud Light of all brands.

Beer has been a symbol for guys as to what kind of person you are. If you drink plain American beer, it is mainly to show that you are a regular American guy. Buying Bud Light is now a symbol that you might consider wearing a dress. Some of the people drank Bud Light to show they are just plain normal, not fancy nor nothin, American guys do not want to signal this. People are not boycotting the beer to punish Anheuser Busch. They are trying to avoid being mocked for the next 50 years or so. Scott had a story about how Eskimos brutally teased people for things that happened decades earlier. Rural folk are like that. Someone who accidentally drank Bud Lite risks being asked about his dresses for the foreseeable future. That kind of joke never grows old if you live somewhere backward enough.

If you were a "red blooded american" you wouldn't let Disney anywhere near your children. It has been prog-propaganda for a long, long time at least 10-15 years. To boycot Disney+ you'd need to be a subscriber first, and my guesstimate is being woke on the sjw-question is inversely corelated with being a disney or netflix subscriber.

But here's my question: is any of this old "bad" stuff actually bad? Let's look at contemporary things like onlyfans, instagram, tiktok, the hundreds of reddit 'gonewild' type porn forums, etc. It seems to me that many women, given the chance, enjoy wearing bikinis, being sexualized, being lusted after etc. Not all women, obviously, since some women don't like this, but...isn't this trying to strip the pro-sexualization women of their agency?

I don't really understand what this paragraph has to do with the advertisement. It seems like the implication is supposed to be "it was bad for beer companies to use sexualized images of women to sell beer" -> "it's wrong for women to post sexualized images of themselves" but it's not clear to me that the second statement follows this first. It seems to me there are lots of ways the first statement could be true without the second statement being true.

Aside from that, isn't Miller saying that women belong...in the kitchen? Don't go out to the beach and get drunk and have fun. Wear modest clothing (like the person in the ad), stay inside in the dark, and make things for people to eat.

I don't understand how this can be a takeaway from this advertisement. Literally every scene involving a woman is outside the home. The advertisement depicts women involved in several parts of the brewing process, every one of which is outside their home. "Stay in the kitchen by.... making fertilizer to grow hops to brew beer for our giant corporation!" Just, what?

Also: the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihenstephan_Abbey

I don't understand how the existence of Weihenstephan Abbey demonstrates that women weren't the primary brewers historically. Especially when the advertisement mentions brewing that predates this abbey pretty substantially.

Sure. One way I think it can be wrong is that reinforces harmful notions of masculinity by connecting perceived success as a man (attractive women will sleep with you) with consuming a particular product (their beer). I think this is common in a lot of marketing that uses sex or sexuality to sell some other product but isn't present in transactions about sex more directly.

The other argument might be that it is wrong to make these images when they are commercial. What I can't get is a reason why commercial images are worse than non-commercial ones.

The reason these images are bad in a commercial context is the implication that the individuals so depicted will sleep with you, or be more into you, or that you will be more successful at attracting the kind of individual so depicted as a result of consuming the product in question. Not obvious to me how a similar principal could be at work in non-commercial contexts.

If men wanting attractive women to sleep with them is a harmful notion of masculinity, I'm rather concerned about the future of humanity.

Aren't the two threads you have here in tension? The brewing that predates the Abbey were in the kitchen. Not that it really matters all that much, just seemed weird that you didn't see what the above poster meant by saying that the ad implied they belong in the kitchen and then pointed to brewing historically done in the ktichen.

The point of emphasizing women's historical role in brewing is to rebut an (implied) presumption that it's something women can't do or are unsuited to doing. It's about the activity. The location is not really important (as you note). I don't see anything in the ad that implies that women's participation in this activity is (or ought to be) limited to the location it was historically done in, quite the opposite. So the OPs inference seemed strange when the content of the ad seemed quite opposed to their point.

The point of emphasizing women's historical role in brewing is to rebut an (implied) presumption that it's something women can't do or are unsuited to doing.

Where does this presumptions originate? The assumption in the advertising is that men like beer more than women, or at the very least consume much more of it. Frankly it seems like a pretty solid assumption from my lived experience with much more parsimonious explanations than that the advertising companies(who have inexplicably decided to stop psyoping us for some implied pro-social motivation) psyoped us all into having these different preferences. Prior to seeing this ad was there even such a meme that it takes a manly person to brew a beer for men? It's a perenial classic to have a big busted feminine lady bring beer to men, would you really predict that an ad in the 90s of a big busted woman brewing the beer for the men first wouldn't do gangbuster? Would it really occur to the men that it's emasculating that a woman brewed their beer?

The whole ad to me just seems like it's fanning the flames to the battle of the sexes for cynical profits. I think the main mistake of the previous poster is in even engaging with it at all. It's just pernicious bullshit to make us hate each other slightly more at the hopes that this somehow translates to more miller lite sales.

Where does this presumptions originate?

I am not sure, but I know it exists. So much so that when I went to a hobbyist class on barrel aged beer the instructor went out of his way to emphasize to us how the best brewers he had known were women (which was extremely awkward). It was pretty clear to me that none of us had any particular bias against women brewers but he expected us to have such a bias.

The assumption in the advertising is that men like beer more than women, or at the very least consume much more of it. Frankly it seems like a pretty solid assumption from my lived experience with much more parsimonious explanations than that the advertising companies(who have inexplicably decided to stop psyoping us for some implied pro-social motivation) psyoped us all into having these different preferences.

I don't understand where "psyop" is coming from as an explanation. One simple explanation (that I think is true) is the gender makeup of who is running beer advertising has changed over the intervening decades and men and women have different ideas about what will get people to buy beer. This also assumes that men and women's relative preferences towards beer are not shaped, in part, by these advertising campaigns. You don't exactly see tons of women's products advertised by unrelated sexy women!

Prior to seeing this ad was there even such a meme that it takes a manly person to brew a beer for men?

I am not plugged into the domestic light beer scene at all but... maybe? Where I grew up there was definitely a general perception that women weren't competent or capable at traditionally male dominated activities.

It's a perenial classic to have a big busted feminine lady bring beer to men, would you really predict that an ad in the 90s of a big busted woman brewing the beer for the men first wouldn't do gangbuster?

I mean, are there any such ads? If such an ad would do gangbusters I am skeptical that the first context it would be thought of in is this conversation we're having.

Would it really occur to the men that it's emasculating that a woman brewed their beer?

My contention is not that such men would find it emasculating, merely that they would doubt a woman's competence as a brewer and so have a bias against any beer they had brewed.

I am sure it did not escape the ad-makers notice that while they're talking about destroying all the "bad" stuff, they're showing it. Nor was the substantial endowment of the spokeswoman an accident.

Behind pixelated faces! It's like bizarro-world Islam where women's faces must be concealed, not the breasts or anything.

Yeesh. Old timey church ladies didn't shame male sexual interests this much.

I'm pretty sure they (descriptively) shamed public displays of sexuality much more, tbh. E.g. - wouldn't approve of even showing the 'bad shit' on screen in the ad.

I have read a lot of Victorian material, and while there was a lot of concern, I'm not sure if they use of shame was comparable, at least against men. Remember that laws regarding prostitution were more liberal back then, in most places, than today. On the other hand, "seduction" (obtaining sex from a woman, especially a virgin of middle or high birth, with the promise of marriage) was a huge source of shame for a man and would destroy his reputation.

The memes/jokes write themselves—

Budweiser: We just had a disastrous marketing campaign designed to advance the careers of our marketing “thought leaders” rather than appeal to our customers

Miller: Hold my beer

If I were a large shareholder of a Food and Beverage company, the last thing I’d want is to have the word “shit” getting mentioned anywhere near our products, including in censored form. We want our customers, and potential customers, to think of “shit” when consuming (or thinking of consuming) our food and drinks? If this happened in Mad Men, fans would have complained that such a marketing campaign is an unrealistic weakman for Don Draper to knock down.

Especially if I were a large shareholder at an American beer company, where our product is already regularly compared to piss or pisswater. This type of principal-agent problem should be unacceptable, where the progressive marketing types are feeling themselves too much, enjoying the smell of their own farts, resume-building using company resources. "Heads, spikes, walls" should be the figurative consequences as GoT Tyrion remarked. Concentrated benefits vs. diffuse costs strike once again.

Although YouTube comments are generally pretty basic, sterile, and devoid of wrong-think nowadays, that Miller Lite video has some zesty top comments (“spicy” would be too strong, as they’re more chives and onion rather than serranos and ghost peppers):

> "I always look for lectures to be given by public companies, (such as Gillette, Budweiser, or Miller Lite), in the form of commercials, to help me see exactly how I am living life with the wrong opinions, and to help guide me to change those opinions or actions to be a better person!" -Said No One Ever

> Love being lectured by a beer company for something I had nothing to do with.

> Considering the spokesperson is the type who benefits most from beer goggles, you would think she wouldn't upset the applecart too much.

> If women brew beer as good as they tell jokes, it's going to be a rough road ahead.

> Yeah, whoever runs the marketing for these beer companies needs to be fired and blacklisted from the industry.

> Did the beer companies all decide to start doing fentanyl back in March or something? How did we get 2 of the best examples of having no clue who your customers were 2 months in a row? Now notice how I said "were" and not "are".

What jumped out to me was the spokeswoman declaring: “They put us in bikinis.” As if beer companies somehow coerced women into being sex objects—rather than it being women’s revealed preferences, that many of them rather enjoy being sex objects.

By their revealed preferences, many (maybe more like most) women enjoy being sex objects to the extent they can. One isn’t supposed to Notice or point it out though, lest women feel less wonderful.

#GirlsWhoWorkOut are often in the gym face-painted, in just sports-bra and compression shorts. Music festivals and Halloween are thinly veiled, plausibly deniable excuses for women to dress up in slutty outfits to take photos of themselves and bait male attention. Instagram/TikTok/SnapChat are full of female selfies, bikini pics, lingerie shots, dances. “Hostess” jobs, ring-girls, and cheerleading squads are never lacking from a dearth of female applicants. Women's sports often serve as feeder leagues for e-thottery (and sometimes OnlyFans), ranging from women's volleyball, tennis, to MMA. Many a #WomanInSTEM treats their job as but a playground for looking cuUuUute. Every preekend in the US, undergraduate girls get dolled-up, slap on their high-heels and slinky cocktail dresses to deliver themselves to the supposed hives of scum, villainy, misogyny, and toxic masculinity that are fraternity houses. Female celebrities might complain about the alleged sexualization of women one moment, but eagerly sexualize themselves the next.

Good for women. Love what you do and you won’t ever have to work a day in your life, to paraphrase the classic quote.

I’d posit a large portion of the seethe caused by The Fappening was it unveiled that women—including famous women—enjoy being sex objects and taking sexualized, submissive photos/videos of themselves, despite presenting otherwise. It’s somewhat less plausibly deniable and #Girlboss-y when you regularly take ass, tits, and pussy shots of yourself for the male gaze, and perhaps have photos/videos floating around of yourself getting facialed like WWE Paige or Jennifer Lawrence.

To circle back on “they put us in bikinis,” it appears that women don’t like to take accountability or ownership of their decisions, their preferences. It's a common form of Merited Impossibility in mainstream discourse. Women hate being sex objects, but if they do love being sex objects it's only due to socialization. And it's not necessarily restricted to the specific topic of being sex objects:

To the extent women aren’t always strong, independent, wonderful #GirlBosses, it’s due to socialization. It’s not their own choices, not their own tendencies, not their own preferences, not their own constitution. Women are socialized to sexualize themselves, socialized to wear make-up, socialized to be preoccupied with fashion, socialized to like wearing sexy underwear and lingerie, socialized to prefer people over things, socialized not to approach men, socialized to be passive rather than active in dating, socialized to prefer tall, high-status men. Their actions and revealed preferences are only due to some exogeneous influence, like society or the patriarchy. Not their fault! They’re just victims in all this.

Socialization is a fully general boogeyman (entity of boogeytry), as if it were an Act of God or extraterrestrial intervention. “Feminists are the real misogynists,” some on the dirtbag left or dissident right might meekly insist, in trying to point out the horseshoe touching between mainstream feminists and outside-the-Overton-window red/blackpillers when it comes to absolving women of agency.

One can, of course, in dating take advantage of the female penchant for being sex objects. Living at and/or renting a nice place with an expensive-looking pool/hot-tub is a great way for getting young women to come straight over to your place, so they can have some plausible deniability and get more bikini-pics for social media. Otherwise they might put up some resistance against coming straight over, and instead push for dinner dates and/or group events (where you can court-jester and monkey-dance for her and her friends and still not get laid).

By their revealed preferences, many (more like most) women rather enjoy being sex objects to the extent they can.

This sounds a bit isomorphic to "Men must want to wear a suit and tie and sit in a cubicle being a wagie for 8 hours a day, look how many of them do it!"

I work in my wagie cube grudgingly because I need the money. It is not beyond imagination that Instagram/TikTok/SnapChat thots have similar ulterior motives.

Women buy an exceedingly large number of excessively expensive swimsuits. Do you have an explanation why?

Perhaps they know that they live in an attention economy, even as they wish they did not? They think it would be better if they were valued for their opinions and not their curves, but alas, it is not so.

(Also I don't think they're spending their own money on those swimsuits)

This sounds a bit isomorphic to "Men must want to wear a suit and tie and sit in a cubicle being a wagie for 8 hours a day, look how many of them do it!"

By revealed preferences, they do. That's because revealed preferences, on their own, don't make for good social inference.

So we can go a little beyond: we can ask men if they would enjoy their work more if they didn't have to wear a suit and tie. We can ask women if they would enjoy having attention and approval more if they didn't have to put any effort into it.

That's an incorrect comparison. Most of the men who work office cubicle jobs do so because there's no other way for them to make a living. This doesn't apply to insta/tiktok/etc models.

This doesn't apply to insta/tiktok/etc models.

Doesn't it?

I mean, obviously the median woman with an Instagram account doesn't need to post Instagram bikini pics to to able to afford bread. But human beings have other requirements, like high-value mates. How do you think (or how does she think) she's going to get one of those without some kind of self-promotion?

I ask you not to move the goalposts. Nobody was discussing such other requirements here.

Yes, I maintain that most of the women modeling full-time on tiktok/insta etc. could also earn a living by doing mundane crappy office cubicle jobs or service jobs etc. What they're doing is a lifestyle choice, not a necessity. This differentiates them from the average man working that same type of job (to earn a living, and not for any ulterior motive), because he usually doesn't have that option.

I ask you not to move the goalposts. Nobody was discussing such other requirements here.

Well I certainly was, and given that I wrote the post to which you are responding, I can assure you that the goalposts remain exactly where I first placed them. My point about working in the wagie cubes was intended to refer to the broad class of "activities engaged in grudgingly" rather than the specific class of "activities engaged in out of purely economic necessity". Revealed preferences need not always refer to the revealed preferences of one's employment.

But with that out of the way:

It feels strange for me to be whiteknighting career e-thots, but I still think your reasoning is flawed. Let's say Job A contains upside 1 and downside 2, while Job B contains upside 3 and upside 4. And let's say the magnitudes of the upsides and downsides run 1 > 2 >> 3 > 4. Job 1 has big upsides and big downsides compared to either in Job B, but in both cases the upside exceeds the downside so you do actually want the job (more than unemployment). That you stick with Job A despite REALLY hating downside 2 is testament to the advantage of upside 1, not that you actually, secretly, masochistically enjoy downside 2.

To but some colour to these scenarios: Job A is Instathot, upside 1 is simpbux, downside 2 is "constant thirstposting in her comments", Job B is office worker, upside 3 is mediocre salary bux, and downside 4 is the anomie of regular office work.

In this rubric we see that it is logically possible that Instathots do not in fact appreciate the drool and asparagus emojis they get in their DMs, but they're willing to put up with it to live the high life. Whether they have any moral right to complain about it is another question - they have signed the Faustian Pact and bought themselves tropical holidays with it, it seems therefore petty to whine that the devil will inevitably take his due. But do they like having to hold up their side of the contract? Well, no-one I know has ever enjoyed holding up their side of a contract, so I can believe that they do, in fact, not, and are just in it for the (lots of) money.

As your comment was a response to a response to the original comment, I’d say you weren’t the one to place the goalposts. You expressed your disagreement with @Butlerian, who expressed his disagreement with the claim in this particular ad that the US beer industry used to put women in bikinis, implying that they were somehow coerced or manipulated into posing for ad photoshoots in bikinis. This is where the goalposts are.

Let’s clarify a few things. If you want to discuss the human requirement to find a high-value mate, then go ahead, but I ask you to recognize that this is a completely different issue. Because it is.

Also, I’ll claim that differentiating “activities engaged in grudgingly [in exchange for money]” from "activities engaged in out of purely economic necessity [that is, in exchange for money]" is needlessly pedantic and pointless.

And also, please recognize the very crucial and clear difference between male office cubicle workers and instathots, namely that the latter are choosing an economic option which does not exist for the former.

I honestly don't understand the weird outrage towards these ad campaigns. People getting angry over "woke" ads just don't understand that not all ads are aimed at them. The drag queen Bud Light endorsement was a short instagram reel and it was aimed at that person's followers, not conservatives or rednecks. It's real main character syndrome energy to get mad because an ad campaign doesn't reflect your own individual or group likes/dislikes/personae.

That's part of the bargain to be a lifestyle brand. If you want people to value your product not just for its practical utility but for what that product says about the people who consume it, then they're going to be as insulted by the unfavorable brand implications as they are flattered by the favorable. It doesn't matter that the ad wasn't "aimed" at them. Lifestyle brand advertising works by influencing what other people think of the product's customers, not just the customers themselves. The whole reason you choose to become a customer of a lifestyle brand is because of what you expect it will make other people think of you.

These aren't "buy our insurance because it's 23.6% cheaper than the competition" kinds of ads. These are lifestyle type of ads. They are promoting certain style and outlook on life and associate it with the brand. If this style is offensive to people who previously associated themselves with the brand, then these people would feel negatively towards the brand from now on. And such kind of action is aimed at everybody, all the time - multi-national brand is not something you advertise in secret. And culture war is not something you join unwittingly - not that BL marketers didn't publish plenty of proclamations suggesting very clearly on whose side they are joining.

Let me give you an extreme example. Suppose some crazy marketer, after taking too much cocaine one night, decided that Nazis - I mean the real ones, the guys prancing around with swastikas and tiki torches - are an under-covered market, and his brand needs to have a campaign aimed at them. And suppose, by a series of freak accidents and misunderstandings, this plan gets approved, set in production and the resulting ad - featuring all a real Nazi loves and seeks in life, presented as a positive lifestyle associated with the brand - is posted on official Instagram channel.

After that happened, and the inevitable aftermath - do you think your explanation that people just don't understand that not all ads are aimed at them is going to play very well or convince somebody that it doesn't mean anything that they disliked the ad?

P.S. For the "trigger warning" part of the audience, hopefully minor, but ever vocal, explicit disclaimer - no, I am not comparing anybody to Nazis. Except for, you know, the actual Nazis.

Let me give you an extreme example. Suppose some crazy marketer, after taking too much cocaine one night, decided that Nazis - I mean the real ones, the guys prancing around with swastikas and tiki torches - are an under-covered market, and his brand needs to have a campaign aimed at them. And suppose, by a series of freak accidents and misunderstandings, this plan gets approved, set in production and the resulting ad - featuring all a real Nazi loves and seeks in life, presented as a positive lifestyle associated with the brand - is posted on official Instagram channel.

And that the product is bagels. Or menorahs.

Maybe they think it's not as simple as you do?

For example, a moderately more complex story could be "Group A tries to appeal to Group B with an ad that Group B likes because it offends Group C." Is A talking to C? Well, that depends on how you precisify "talking to".

I honestly don't understand the weird outrage towards these ad campaigns. People getting angry over "woke" ads just don't understand that not all ads are aimed at them. The drag queen Bud Light endorsement was a short instagram reel and it was aimed at that person's followers, not conservatives or rednecks. It's real main character syndrome energy to get mad because an ad campaign doesn't reflect your own individual or group likes/dislikes/personae.

I don't understand why it's hard to understand. These ads are potentially offensive on several levels.

  • They offend the core demographic of the brand by selecting a message that is antithetical to the values of the core demographic of the brand.

  • One level deeper: They selected this message precisely because it offends their core demographic. The only other possibility is that the marketers really have no idea who their core demographic is, but as the Bud Light exec said in the video that was circulating, this was not the case. They want to replace their uncool customers with cool customers.

  • One level removed: From the POV of someone who doesn't care about either brand, it just seems like an insanely bad idea to market against one's customer base, making it offensive to notions of common sense or of an orderly rational universe.

  • There is a baked-in dishonestly to several parts of either ad in their concepts of their new targeted demographics. Are women of any biological persuasion really going to be moved to drink lite beer because of these ad campaigns? Is the Miller Lite ad seriously presupposing that sexist ads drove women away from beer as more a likely explanation than sexist ads were created to appeal to the major beer-drinking market: men who like hot women and cold beer? Let alone the claims made about the preponderance of beer-brewing women or the gender of one particular spokesperson.

One almost has to not look at all to not find something offensive to mere common sense.

Cynical bastard in me can't help but suspect that the sudden prominence of this in social media despite it being older than the whole Mulvaney fiasco is at least in part the InBev marketing department trying to distract from/cover thier tracks.

Blurring the faces of those women on the cardboard cutout is an interesting strategy in an ad meant to promote women.

the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong:

The explicit claim seems to be that women were "some of the first" to brew beer, which is nearly content free but also true I guess.

I can't claim to know a lot about marketing, but I don't know how this campaign got out of the gates:

-The word "Shit" is spoken a dozen times in their beverage ad and "Shit" is printed on their product. If your ad campaign works, people associate Miller with "Good Shit". Like I took a good shit this morning.

-Mud wrestling ads from 2003 are not on the forefront of anybody's mind in 2023. Nobody associates Miller with those long forgotten about ads. Nobody except for the all female marketing team responsible for the ad, who apparently were looking over old ads and posters and took them personally.

-Like Bud Light's marketing executive, Miller is taking a swipe at their core demographic of straight guys. Why are companies hiring marketers who hate the consumers of their products? Do they think they can do a 1:1 trade for a cooler demo?

-Who is going to participate in this Stalinist campaign? Who still has Miller Lite bikini ads from the 90's and wants to destroy them so they can Stand With Women?

-Literally destroying beauty (blurred faces, turning into mulch) and using homely women to sell your product.


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