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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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In Canada, we have no Gerrymandering because an independent body sets the electoral district boundaries and there are guidelines they must follow.

These voting systems are overly complicated and have lots of flaws. I don't understand why there's so little support for approval voting or range voting, which are very simple and would solve almost all of the problems with first past the post.

The advantage of the party backroom is that they do the deep screening beforehand. It's not really feasible for each voter to do a deep dive on every candidate's ideology and honesty.

Political parties have other advantages. They give a general platform that a representative is expected to follow. Without them complex issues are decided by whichever side has the most access.

Another big one is responsibility. If I think the the federal government is being poorly run then I can help out on a marginal election campaign to take out the ruling party. Toronto city council has no parties. If I think things are poorly run who do I help out to change the power balance? It's really not clear.

Your D'Hondt link points to the wrong resource.

Who determines who gets to be represented on the ballot? If my party has 20 candidates in district A, do they all get printed? What if there are 200 candidates?

How well does this method protect against clones? Since the votes are tallied by party, having a Republican and a True Republican party on the ballot will hurt both. This will probably lead to big tent parties instead of promoting more fluent coalitions.

How susceptible is the method to tactical voting? From what I see, voting for the most preferred candidate inside the party is relatively safe, as my vote won't be wasted, but voting outside the party is risky. If my two most preferred choices are the Democratic Socialist candidates and my third to seventh most preferred choices are plain donkey Democratic candidates, then it's better to give my vote to my third most preferred candidate.

Answering from the Finnish system:

Who determines who gets to be represented on the ballot?

Parties.

If my party has 20 candidates in district A, do they all get printed? What if there are 200 candidates?

In Finnish system, the number of candidates is limited. In parliamentary elections the max limit is either 14 or the number of total candidates elected from the district, whichever is bigger. In local elections it is 133 % the number of candidates elected from a district (since deputy councillors have an actual function).

How well does this method protect against clones? Since the votes are tallied by party, having a Republican and a True Republican party on the ballot will hurt both. This will probably lead to big tent parties instead of promoting more fluent coalitions.

There's 9 parliamentary parties in Finland. Of course they have variance, but in practice they all have enough differences to justify their individual existence, mostly, even if those differences are often obscure from the outside. Generally just establishing a clone party is not successful (one party has been established by a wealthy businessman who does not have major ideological differences with his old party and just wanted more power - it has not gone really anywhere beyond getting himself elected)

How susceptible is the method to tactical voting? From what I see, voting for the most preferred candidate inside the party is relatively safe, as my vote won't be wasted, but voting outside the party is risky. If my two most preferred choices are the Democratic Socialist candidates and my third to seventh most preferred choices are plain donkey Democratic candidates, then it's better to give my vote to my third most preferred candidate.

This is a continuous source of tension in the Finnish system. There have been cases where very prominent politicians have not been elected since they didn't get enough votes since the voters went "well, they'll get elected anyway, I'll tactically vote for an edge case". Whether one votes primarily on the basis of party or on the basis of liking an individual candidate also varies from a person to person.

Unless I misunderstood something, this is the Finnish election system, though the voting process is slightly different (each candidate is assigned a number, and you vote by putting the number of that candidate on the ballot) and we use bigger electoral districts (these were combined a while back, since the small electoral districts were considered to create a situation that was discriminatory against smaller parties).

It has worked fine for 100 years - the biggest complaints some election nerds is that they consider it to be too candidate-centered (parties put up celebrities or people whose political line differs majorly from the party's actual line on the ballot to get votes for the party etc.)

You made me stop lurking and register an account just to answer you!

Your proposed system has some similarity to the Hare-Clark system used in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. The big difference of course is that Hare-Clark is a preferential system where you number candidates 1, 2, 3, etc in order of preference.

This has a number of theoretical advantages - voters can mix and match between candidates of different parties, for example. So let's say the GOP is running a ticket of Trump, Pence, and Romney. So if I'm a voter who likes Romney but hates Trump, and I expect Trump to get more votes than Romney, in your suggested system I don't want to vote my real preference because it may well help elect the guy I hate.

Whereas in Hare-Clark I can vote 1 Romney, 2 Pence, 3 Biden, 4 Harris, etc and never give my vote to Trump.

The big drawback relative to your system is that it requires voters to rank candidates rather than just casting one vote. If there are a lot of candidates this can be a pain in the arse. We kind of compromise on this by requiring a certain number of rankings (usually equal to the number of seats available to win) and making any further preferences optional.

Welcome back!

I’ve missed you. Your sneer/state/debate post was one of the best things I read on the old sub.

My theory: most of what is now called "white supremacy" is just boomers attempting to prolong "boomer reality." (Obviously not all boomers)

What do I mean by "boomer reality"? Boomers are an American cohort born in unprecedented wealth when America was the only intact industrial power. They are also quite large cohort and were therefore over their lives able to use their influence to "fine-tune" America to their specifications. Boomers like to drive, therefore America is easy accessible via cars, not so much via public transport. This is also why gasoline tends to be cheaper in America than elsewhere. Boomers love to see their property values soar, therefore pretty much nothing is legal to build anywhere in America. (or so I hear)

What looks like white supremacy is boomers' dislike towards brown immigrants. But I would argue that the reason is not that they are brown, it is because they are not part of "boomer reality." Hispanics are more used to public transport (compared to white boomers) and are also okay with living in higher density. If lots of Hispanics materialize in America, and have a chance to vote for their preferences, this might result in more public transport (which boomers don't need) and more dense housing (bringing boomer property values down).

This also explains boomer opposition towards global warming. Global warming implies that car-centric culture might not be completely sustainable and anything that implies "boomer reality" might not be sustainable is an enemy.

I do think "boomer reality" is now very toxic, but here's how it is different from old white supremacy: Southern white supremacists cared a lot about their own legacy. They were thoroughly evil people, but they did care for their own white children (and noone else). White plantation owners could picture the world without themselves in it. Not the world without plantations (they fought a war over it), but one with different owners (their sons) running these plantations.

Boomers are fundamentally narcissistic and they cannot imagine anyone else as main characters of life, not even their own children. And that's the black heart of "boomer reality". Real white supremacy would be white male tenured boomer professor retiring and giving his tenured seat to his younger -- also white male -- protege. That's not at all what's happening, instead cushy tenured professorships are being replaced with insecure nontenured positions -- mostly held by brown and female people.

Calling this "white supremacy" almost gives it too much dignity. This is fire sale.

"White supremacy" is simply not the right terminology to describe what is happening. It is also unfair because younger whites are not profiting at all from "boomer reality". Accusing a poor white millenial of "white supremacy" is kicking the chained dog. I suspect the popularity of the concept -- alongside most of "awokening" -- is the result of elite millenials getting radicalized by realization that their Boomer parents intend to spend everything on luxury cruises and leave them with jack shit. In other words awokening is fueled precisely by a lack of actual, working white supremacy. (As well as a lack of any other safety net for precarious millenials)

(Don't get me wrong, I do think it is good white supremacy is no more, my point is that boomer narcissism is also bad, but in a very different way)

Why do I think my theory is correct? Because there was a similar generation divide in my native Serbia (then Yugoslavia) in the early 90's although generations were one step back. It was "Greatest Generation", Silent Generation and some elder boomers, versus younger boomers and x-ers (millenials were still young children or not yet born). The former still lived in "communist reality" while that reality begun to unravel for the latter.

One of the reasons why Milosevic ruled over Serbia for so long is because he promised the pensioners that their pensions will remain untouched no matter what. So there was a bloody civil war with younger generations being thrown into meat grinder which had comparatively little impact on the old people (not zero impact due to inflation, but lesser impact). What Milosevic promised to the old was continuation of "communist reality" till they die. And they followed him.

Not saying that the younger Serbian generations were completely innocent here -- there were some rabid warmongers there too -- but the whole thing would have been impossible without the compliance of the old people.

I don't think it is a coincidence that both Trump and Milosevic have promised to the old people continuation of their respective realities. Hence old people disproportionately voting for them.

Returning to situation in America, what I think is going to happen is that "boomer reality" is going to continue unraveling and it will be replaced with "woke reality." The advantage of woke reality is that it is cheap -- you don't need a car and a house to live it, just internet connection. Problem is that it is not all that much more real than "boomer reality". It is based on throwing around inaccurate inflammatory terms like "white supremacy" (as I explained) and on funding things like DEI offices -- which make people MORE racist. A self licking ice cone. None of it is as toxic as boomer reality, true, but it is still a type of unreality.

One variable I am unsure of is how much of boomer wealth will millennials be able to actually inherit. Are boomers really going to spend it all on luxury cruises and nursing homes? If not, if millennials actually inherit something valuable, they might switch from woke into something similar to "boomer reality," possibly also justified by wokeness. Something something building more housing is racist somehow. Obviously I am not saying that EVERY millenial is going to end up like this, but then not every boomer is Trump voter.

But I am just a millenial from Serbia, and first to admit that I don't know jack. What do you think?

I'll take the opportunity to shill https://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Promised-Freedom-Delivered-Disaster/dp/0593086759

There are some great/awful stories in there. It has six chapters devoted to six notable boomers. For instance, Sotormayor's first attendance of the judge's annual party put on by the outgoing clerks (where they put on little skits and musical parodies). After they were finished, she stood up and said their skits 'lacked a certain something', putting on salsa music and encouraging the other judges to dance. This went against protocol and was extremely awkward for the others. RBG's husband had died 3 days earlier, yet Sotomayor told her that her dead husband would've wanted her to dance.

Sotormayor is also the one who confused de jure and de facto.

This is a lot of words to essentially say that people tend to vote in their own self-interest, unless I'm missing some more salient point in there.

I don't think the initial claim ("most of what is now called "white supremacy" is just boomers attempting to prolong "boomer reality."") is even particularly true, because I don't think most accusations of white supremacy are even aimed at boomers; they're aimed primarily at millennials who reject wokeness as far as I can tell. If only because most of those accusations happen online where the boomers, well, aren't.

Conversely, popular millennial leftist politics are just as inherently selfish as boomer politics, it's just that it's based on appropriating wealth from other people instead of conserving existing wealth.

..

the boomers were not white supremacist enough

No way! The Civil Rights movement was correct. It also doesn’t imply either 1. or 2. It is perfectly possible to move to the Midwest and dodge all those dirty minorities. Curiously, this isn’t enough to earn you a nice school and job. It does depress housing prices, because for some reason, Bumblefuck, Kansas isn’t actually that popular.

I don’t think it’s accurate to call Hispanic immigration a product of Boomer anti racism, either. More a corporate/laissez faire policy.

I'd like to see you try to pass an Intellectual Turing Test for arguing why the Civil Rights movement was bad.

I don’t think it’s accurate to call Hispanic immigration a product of Boomer anti racism, either. More a corporate/laissez faire policy.

Por que no los dos? Almost all policies have a Bootleggers and Baptists aspect to them -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

Not sure I can. I mean, you’ve already provided the standard argument: that minorities are responsible for (insert QoL decrease here). It could be a bit stronger, since I don’t believe you really demonstrated the link. If I had to pass the test, I’d start from your argument and try to explain how the Midwest is simultaneously cheap and very, very white.

As for Baptists and bootleggers, I have no trouble believing Boomer antiracists would be included in such a coalition. I just…don’t see much evidence of them. The Boomers I know are pretty conservative, and today that means skepticism on immigration. It’s the Gen-Xers who are more likely to take the neoliberal or progressive stance. And in both groups, old-school race blindness still holds more sway than antiracism.

Then again, I’m in a pretty conservative part of the country, surrounded by defense engineers and a family of rednecks. My finger isn’t exactly on the pulse of Boomer sentiment.

I grew up in South Carolina. Yes, yes I have. Around 60% black for my abysmal high school.

You proposed that black people are icky, so white people turned to the last refuge of legal discrimination: price. I think this is a flawed theory. If an all-white school was so valuable, the Midwest would look very different, as priced-out whites moved to the educational utopias of Ardmore and Lincoln.

What do the terrible schools of the Midwest and the Deep South and the rust belt have in common? They’re poor as hell. The unemployment and the addictions and the fucked-up families are not conducive to good schools or to successful citizens. They’re also not unique to black people.

I know the answer to all your questions. I also know you’re mistaking correlation for causation.

If black people caused poor schools, you would expect white-bread schools to do much better. As far as I know, that’s not true out in the boonies. The common factor is poverty, and I don’t think the Civil Rights Act is to blame for that.

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In fairness to the boomers, the boomers that are currently going on luxury cruises did spend an enormous amount of time and money raising their kids for 18 years and then paying for their college education.

I've not been above a bit of boomer-negging in my time, but I'd also add to this - what's the alternative? Sure, in previous times parents might strive to leave their children an inheritance. But this was really more a luxury of the landed and rich, the ones we pay disproportionate attention to, who leave the most records. I question how common inheritances of any size really were. And though I'm sure there are no surfeit of examples of boomers who sold their retirements for boats breast implants and booze, there also seems to be a prevailing norm of saving enough to at least scrape by on your own until you die.

Far more common was the burden of caring for ageing parents in their dotage, both financially and physically. It might just be my American individualism or whatever speaking, but, as much as I appreciate a culture that's invested enough in family and long-term bonds to respect and care for the elderly, there is something a bit perverse about landing whatever poor woman you arranged to marry your eldest son to serve you hand and foot during your last years. Fillial duty beats a lot of alternatives culturally speaking, but I don't think it beats what we strive for now.

Finally, though you note that the expectation of great returns on an expensive education were rather tragically misplaced, doesn't it make sense to give to your children when young rather than when they're old and past being able to use the resources for much of their most productive years? Inheritance is nice, but I think it's taken a backburner importance in people's priorities for a reason.

boomers like to drive

God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.

People point at some fairy tale version of a Finnish city where there's playgrounds everywhere and people are walking around drinking espressos and beers and wearing scarves and children are laughing and playing with one another in city squares.

It's not the lack of cars that is causing this unless cars is some sort of euphamism and I'm just not pol-pilled enough to understand what you guys mean when you envision a car free city. My city is a "walkable" city. From where I am sitting typing this there are a dozen coffee shops within a 5 minute walk, countless bars and restaurants, shopping, there's a train that goes literally right in front of my house, and a stop for that train a block away. There are 5 parks I can think of offhand that are within the same 5 minute walk from my house.

Guess what? I still drive EVERYWHERE I go.

  • I can bike, but if I bike I have to carry a 20lb chain with me to lock it, and even then I worry about the wheels being stolen, the seat being stolen, the lights being stolen, or some other set of things being stolen. ALL of this has happened to me or people I am close friends with. I have had bikes stolen that were locked up, parts stolen off of my bikes, etc.

  • I can walk, but I have to take a bizarre circuitous route that avoids: the park, the local drug store, all of the bus stops, all of the train stops, and any convenience stores which are currently being used as homeless shelters and drug injection sites. Even still I've had friends robbed or beaten up walking through my city.

  • I could take the idiotic train that our city is so proud of (and everybody who can actively avoids), and be accosted by the schizophrenic psychopaths who are using the train as a refuge from the weather.

The parks are de facto homeless encampments, meaning if I want to take my kids to play, guess where I go? 30 minutes out into the suburbs.

This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.

What city do you live in?

God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.

I'm with all the other guys posting down there: lived it, still kinda do, it's pretty neat. What gives?

For what it's worth, I mean that genuinely: how do you square multiple people telling you things are fine with your post insisting it is, in your own words, terrible?

This is nonsense and you completely lack perspective. I've never owned a car in my life, which is completely normal here, coming from a small European city.

some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free"

I do, it is amazing. I haven't driven a car once in 2023. I used to have to drive a car everyday on the west coast. I can confidently proclaim that at least all NYC boroughs, Boston (until 2022 MBTA collapse), Mumbai, Madrid, Singapore & Paris can be lived in completely car free.

Note: I have nothing against cars. I literally have an automobile-engineering degree and spent a past life building cars at a big-car co. I love cars, I love road trips and I don't drink just so I can be the happy designated driver. It's just ....... Cars just make no sense as the primary mode of transport in an urban environment. Yeah you can have a car. A fast, spacious and small car. VW Gold R, Model 3 & the Mazda 3 Turbo are better SUVs than SUVs. You just don't need to drive it 99% of the time. Guess what ? The roads are still packed with cars. But now those who NEED to drive can drive, and the rest of us get convenient options.

This can be achieved in smaller towns too. There is high car ownership in college towns (Amherst, Ithaca) and small town New England (Portland Maine), but people still walk around or take transit for most occasions. The car comes out when it's needed.

I can bike, but if I bike I have to carry a 20lb chain with me to lock it

Many major cities now have bike sharing systems around the city which completely eliminates the need to carry your own bike around.

I can walk, but homeless shelters and drug injection sites.

Sounds like Portland, Seattle, SF..... west coast cities are not walkable. They are not even cities. They are dystopian examples of human deterioration. West coast cities are exactly what happens when car culture is unwilling to cede any ground. Not a single wealthy boomer lives in the city core, because highways drop you in the middle of the city core anyway. All 3 of these cities are designed with meeting the needs of car based visitors more than the needs of the residents. And it shows.

The parks are de facto homeless encampments, meaning if I want to take my kids to play, guess where I go? 30 minutes out into the suburbs.

I fully agree with you here. Progressives are idiots. Stringent enforcement of public-safety is first step towards convincing people to move out of cars.

This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.

It is true. They did ruin everything. It's just that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy now. Boomers created the wound and cars were the bandage. So if you ever suggest removal of bandage it gets met with obvious anger. But if you ask for funding to treat the wound itself, it gets treated with confusion and dismissal.

cars are great for things that are time-sensitive or far away. Public transportation is so slow and a hassle. walking is really slow. i think having a car is nice because it gives options even if you do not use it.

Poorly designed transit is slow. Walking is slow when things are far apart. You can absolutely design cities so that other options are faster than driving... especially since if everyone is driving, you inevitability face heavy congestion, especially within cities. When I was in Switzerland the trains ran beautifully (even during construction) and were probably much easier than driving would have been.

Cars are useful for some things but it would be nice if I didn't have to own one just to get around town, and could get by using one rarely enough that I could make do with the various car rental apps.

This is probably nothing new, but I'd argue that cars are great (i.e. efficiently used) for one thing, that is, for a nuclear family to move between two locations, as long as both our outside urban cores.

Public transportation is so slow and a hassle.

Public transit is only slow if it is has to sit in traffic. In NYC, Boston & Western Europe, it is a lot faster to get around in public transit than in cars. The problem with cars, is that you have to build larger roads and parking spaces everywhere. That makes transit impossible. That leads to everyone using cars, which in turn requires larger roads and parking spaces. So now everyone wants to go somewhere by far fast, but that that has made traffic worse and the place you want to go to farther off. When you build for transit, everything is so close by that even walking is faster than a car.

far away

Yes ofc. Agreed. For anything out of town, trains can serve a similar purpose. But I am not opposed to cars as an essential means of transport outside the city core.

All of this is especially perplexing giving the rampant drinking culture in the US. If the only fun event in most towns is drinking, then how can I drive to the spot ? I guess the obesity epidemic keeps the BAC levels low /s .

Public transit is only slow if it is has to sit in traffic. In NYC, Boston & Western Europe, it is a lot faster to get around in public transit than in cars.

Only because NYC has managed to slow cars enough. Transit in NYC is slow in general, it's just not as slow as driving to most places.

When you build for transit, everything is so close by that even walking is faster than a car.

LOL. Have you ever been to New York City?

LOL. Have you ever been to New York City?

I live in NYC.

NYC has managed to slow cars enough

What could NYC do to speed up cars more ? What has it done to slow cars down ?

NYC manages to excel by American standards, but that's a passing grade for global cities in the rest of the world. As compared to other cities of the world, NYC actually allows cars to take a highway straight into the downtown core of the city. Other cities cut off the highway at the edge of the ring road that surrounds the city core. Both Manhattan highways occupy the most expensive waterfront space in the world. If the 2 highways were fully moved underground, you'd be looking at one of the most expensive sale of airspace in the entire history of humanity.

Parking is free or dirt cheap in most of the city, while occupying area that generates far more revenue if given as restaurant seating space. Note there are 3 types of people who take cars into NYC. The first are people who are so rich, that they could have simply taken a daily cab instead. The second are slightly-rich people who commute into the city with a car, who should have to pay actual market rate for parking or have their employer pay it. The final are disabled people who ofc deserve to be accommodated, and should have separate reserved parking on each block.

What has it done to slow cars down ?

Pack too many people in too little space.

Parking is free or dirt cheap in most of the city

Which excludes most of Manhattan.

But your claim was

When you build for transit, everything is so close by that even walking is faster than a car.

Have you walked from Chelsea to Soho? I have, it takes a damn long time, and it's not a huge portion of the length of the island. If we're not talking just about Manhattan, crossing the East River on foot takes a long time itself -- the Brooklyn bridge is a mile long and the pedestrian path is often crowded. The Williamsburg bridge is even longer and has more of a climb. Cities aren't built to walking scale.

Have you walked from Chelsea to Soho?

Yeah, it's 30 minutes. In those 30 minutes you see more inspired architecture and more Michelin starred restaurants than entire regions of the US. A good few grocery stores, a target, every fashion store that exists and some of the world's premier underground performance locations (Smalls Jazz, Comedy central). You'll cross effectively 100k people worth of housing, and all in a 30 minute walk, 10 minute bike share, or a 10 minute subway ride.

30 minutes in the traffic in LA, and you're still in traffic while having burned 200 fewer calories.

Pack too many people in too little space.

...this is what makes a city, a city. Are you just opposed to the existence of cities?

Cities aren't built to walking scale.

I think it's clear from the other poster's previous comments that they mean a combination of walking and transit; not that you can walk literally everywhere. No one who lives in NYC would walk all over the entire city. I think you can understand this and are trying to make gotchas rather than engage in good faith.

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I agree. However, it is a large capital investment, so once you make the plunge to buy one, it makes sense to use it whenever it would be marginally advantageous to do so.

I have basically zero knowledge on this subject, but weren't Portland and Seattle founded and established way before car use became widespread?

Yep, the i5 and i90 literally tore through the middle of downtown Seattle. Seattle used to have a superior public transit network in 1914 than it does in 2022.

West coast cities are exactly what happens when car culture is unwilling to cede any ground. Not a single wealthy boomer lives in the city core, because highways drop you in the middle of the city core anyway. All 3 of these cities are designed with meeting the needs of car based visitors more than the needs of the residents. And it shows.

Can you expand this? I've never heard somebody blame the drug/homelessness/theft/inner city problems on cars before. Is the idea that you should force people to live among the filth, because then they would be more motivated to fix it?

Can you expand this? I've never heard somebody blame the drug/homelessness/theft/inner city problems on cars before. Is the idea that you should force people to live among the filth, because then they would be more motivated to fix it?

That's my bad. I conflated multiple things together and wrote a confusing mess.

All 3 of these cities are designed with meeting the needs of car based visitors more than the needs of the residents. And it shows.

I meant that serving the interests of commuters rather than tax-payers of the city has led to cities being carved up in ways that is hostile to the city's residents. This is a pure urban planning complaint, and not an inner city related problem.

drug/homelessness/theft/inner city problems on cars

Agreed. I am blaming it squarely on incompetent city govts. SF, Seattle and Portland's local govts have done everything in their power to make public spaces feel unsafe and public transit feel unusable. To be fair, if you've ever parked in the downtowns of any of these cities, cars don't feel much safer either.

you should force people to live among the filth, because then they would be more motivated to fix it?

It is a good question. Because dumping an interstate through the city must've cost around $25B in adjusted costs (using BigDig as reference). Surely that is enough money to solve a homelessness issue for any competently run city govt. Sadly, SF is the diametric opposite of competent. So we have a human constructed hellscape that progressives are convinced is what heaven looks like. I like that about New England liberals. Lot less incompetent.

God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.

A lot of them have done so, probably most notably NotJustBikes, who moved to Amsterdam.

Most of these problems seem to be unrelated to the extent to which a city is walkable. Car-dependent American cities still have homelessness, crime, and drug use, while many walkable ones in Europe or Japan have much less. Walkability does not mean doing nothing about social problems; Amsterdam did a lot of work (see section 9) to clean itself up.

This idea that "boomers like cars and ruined everything by making car centric cities" is absurd and I can only assume is parroted by people who never leave their goon caves.

This is unnecessarily rude, but also seems to neglect history. Were cities already plagued by the same issues after WW2, when the exodus to car-dependent suburbs began, and is that why people started to leave? Have the policies imposed to make cities and suburbs more amenable to cars, such as knocking down urban neighborhoods to make way for highways, or preventing any housing from being built, contributed to these social problems?

(The actual thing to object to is that boomers aren't responsible for these policies for the most part--it's actually Silent and Greatest, until more recently.)

Most of these problems seem to be unrelated to the extent to which a city is walkable.

I strongly disagree! People won't want to walk or take mass transit if they feel much more likely to be victimized in doing so. This creates a spiral, where the most walking-friendly destinations and infrastructure end up neglected, making them even less attractive, and people who want to drive end up going elsewhere.

Were cities already plagued by the same issues after WW2, when the exodus to car-dependent suburbs began, and is that why people started to leave?

Yes. People began moving to suburbs almost as soon as they could get cars. Even before, with the "streetcar suburbs" proliferating in the 1920's. Then rising crime and unrest, and safety-hostile urban policies like blockbusting and forced school integration caused mass flight right when the new interstates made it convenient to do so. But notably this happened in the sixties when the boomers were still children or young adults. The highway builders and urban renewists were mostly members of the Greatest Generation. The Boomers just inherited their world, and actually put a lot of effort into fixing the bigger mistakes, leading to an urban renaissance in the 90's, at which point they seemed to have declared victory and turned their attention inward.

This creates a spiral, where the most walking-friendly destinations and infrastructure end up neglected, making them even less attractive, and people who want to drive end up going elsewhere.

Something like this is possible, or even likely. Another point, often made by urbanists, is that having more regular people in spaces makes them safer, and feel safer, because of safety in numbers. However, mainly what I was trying to get at is that the policies that allow lawlessness to continue and spread are orthogonal to policies that favor driving/other modes of transportation, and so it is entirely possible (easy, even, aside from the political constraints that seem to be unique to America) to make walkable places that are nothing like what firmamenti describes.

Yes. People began moving to suburbs almost as soon as they could get cars. Even before, with the "streetcar suburbs" proliferating in the 1920's. Then rising crime and unrest, and safety-hostile urban policies like blockbusting and forced school integration caused mass flight right when the new interstates made it convenient to do so.

Streetcar suburbs are the opposite of a car-dependent development and are not a problem.

I think you should re-check your history. Homicide rates declined from the mid 30s until the mid 60s, which is exactly when American governments started demolishing urban neighborhoods to build highways, subsidizing homeownership, etc.

If you're just going to drop a thinly veiled claim that being near black people is a public safety hazard, you should have some evidence for it. "Controversial claims require evidence" etc.

Streetcar suburbs are the opposite of a car-dependent development and are not a problem.

I'll nitpick a bit because why not. Even if streetcar suburbs still existed and functioned, their popularity would still mean White flight, or middle-class flight, from the urban core, resulting in the long-term decay of the latter.

This is obviously hypothetical, but I disagree. Taking a streetcar (or tram, bus, light rail, whatever) into the city, and walking to your final destination, is very different from living in a far-flung exurb that, at best, involves commuting for work (and by the 80s, often didn't even involve that much). And building such places is far less destructive to the city itself. One could argue this just subjects the middle class to the awful conditions of the cities in the 70s without any alternative; on the other hand, maybe if they stay, they vote for better crime policies, provide stabilizing social forces, don't displace lots of inner-city residents, and improve the tax base in the city. (My inner libertarian is outraged at that last one, but usually whenever the urban/suburban arguments start to happen on TheMotte, someone tells me that it's ok that car-dependent suburbs are subsidized because one function of government is to provide public goods for the benefit of all, so I figure what's good for the goose is good for the gander).

As far as I can tell, this "long-term decay" lasted a few decades and has generally been on the reverse since the 90s (in general; obviously some cities continued to decline, but e.g. NYC has had increasing population over the past few decades.)

Streetcar suburbs are the opposite of a car-dependent development and are not a problem.

They may be car-dependent now if there street cars are gone. In the one near me it does keep the homeless and adjacent criminal elements from the nearby city from riding public transit out to the suburbs.

If the street cars are gone (and not replaced with some other transit) it's not really a streetcar suburb anymore.

Perhaps. And many such suburbs were annexed by the city anyways. Point is that the strong impulse to live near the city but not in it predates cars. It was not cars that created the impulse to move to suburbs, or was the desire to move to suburbs that caused people to demand cars.

Suburbs are very old, but the cities they surrounded were never rebuilt to allow the suburbanites easier access to the detriment of the city's inhabitants. Certainly the streetcar suburbs we just discussed did not do that and did not require that. Cars' mere existence are not the problem; it's enforced car dependence: Knocking down urban neighborhoods to build highways to the suburbs (which already couldn't handle all the traffic even back in the 50s), building suburbs that can literally only be accessed or traversed in a car, preventing the building of any housing other than sprawling and expensive single family homes, etc.

Agree and great comment. Just because I'm curious and skeptical, where does the idea of blockbusting come from? Did this actually happen a lot, was it rare, or was it (like poisoned Halloween candy) a complete fabrication?

For those who don't know, blockbusting was the supposed practice of real estate speculators putting black tenants (preferably violent ones) into a previously white neighborhood. When the white neighbors fled, the speculator would buy their houses for cheap and then rent them as a slumlord to new black tenants.

While Wikipedia says "blockbusting was very common and profitable", this feels like a just-so story. I wonder to what extent it really happened. It feels like an effort to blame evil white landlords for a process that would happen naturally anyway.

I think a big reason that urbanism is getting so much attention since 2020 is that it brings suburban swing voters within striking distance of rioters. The threat of violence is a useful stick when there's a close election or politically charged trial coming up. For example, Rep. Maxine Waters called on protestors to get more "confrontational" if Chauvin was acquitted at his trial. So violence is a useful tool but the problem is that a lot of voters live in the suburbs which aren't as easily accessible to BLM or Antifa. Even worse: they often have separate police forces and DA's that would be less sympathetic to burnings and beatings. If you get rid of the cars you force people to move closer to the city center where you're able to more credibly threaten them.

I can bike, but if I bike I have to carry a 20lb chain with me to lock it, and even then I worry about the wheels being stolen, the seat being stolen, the lights being stolen, or some other set of things being stolen. ALL of this has happened to me or people I am close friends with. I have had bikes stolen that were locked up, parts stolen off of my bikes, etc.

I can walk, but I have to take a bizarre circuitous route that avoids: the park, the local drug store, all of the bus stops, all of the train stops, and any convenience stores which are currently being used as homeless shelters and drug injection sites. Even still I've had friends robbed or beaten up walking through my city.

I could take the idiotic train that our city is so proud of (and everybody who can actively avoids), and be accosted by the schizophrenic psychopaths who are using the train as a refuge from the weather.

This is an civility problem, not a walking problem. In South Africa they have problems with thieves stealing copper, poor maintenance of aging power plants... there's lots of load shedding. This doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with electricity or power grids in general. It shows that South Africa is not a well-organized country, amongst other things.

I live car-free just fine in a proper, civilized country. There are many civilized cities where public transport is full of working people as opposed to drug addicts. The solution to your city's problems is vigorous policing, removing the problem people.

I'd argue it's more of a law enforcement problem.

All the law enforcement in the world doesn't fix low trust societies. You need the stock of the people to be of a "better" kind where you don't really fear you'll get mugged/stabbed/raped for going on a walk with your two children in the middle of the day.

What does "stock" of the people mean here?

edit： I don't mean to sound baiting, I am genuinely curious. Like, breeding? Genetic superiority? Socioeconomic status? More genteel class manners?

I mean. Is Eugene, Oregon c. 2015 a "low trust society"? If you get the wheels stolen off your bike, as I did, odds are it's not Tyrone from the 'hood doing the stealing. It's probably some white dude who may or may not have a meth habit. Not that much violent crime out there, but a hell of a lot of bike theft.

That's still a lost trust society just a different gradient of "low trust". In a "normal" high trust society you don't even need to lock your bike because there aren't any methheads around to do petty crime.

But I think it' also true that high-trust societies are also prone to enact policies that result in lousy conditions such as this, such as deinstitutionalizing mentally ill people, lenient sentencing etc. Plus, I'm sure that White flight and urban decay affects high-trust societies as well.

(load shedding refers to, "people in this area don't get to have power right now," planned by the power company so that they have enough power)

Why the hell aren't they calling it a rolling blackout like everyone else? Very confusing term

You wouldn’t want to be crushed by the darkness, so you lighten the weight on your shoulders. It’s a nice chiaroscuro reversal to think about by candlelight.

Agreed, I commute daily via transit and my car is the last possession I'd give up besides my home. I'm as far from carfree as is possible to be.

God I seriously wish that some of these anti-car people could just spend a month actually living in the "car free" cities that they think everybody wants so they could realize how terrible it is.

I've lived in a city like this for almost four decades now. I own a car only because my wife loves her dacha and that's a quarter of a year spent in the exurbs where a car is a necessity. It's still a B-segment car and not an SUV.

I literally haven't driven a car in 20 years, ie. after I did my driving license (which I've since lost). I don't live in a fairytale Finnish city, I live in a normal Finnish city.

The OP's city sounds like a fine place to live without a car apart from schizo addicted criminals taking over all the public spaces. So perhaps the issue doesn't have to do much with cars at all.

Oh contraire, boomers IME tend to admit that things are incredibly hard for young people right now, high percentages are supporting children or grandchildren, and it being illegal to build things is a phenomenon of extreme bureaucratic inefficiency applied to environmental regulations.

extreme bureaucratic inefficiency applied to environmental regulations

This is correct and more strangely, it is the same young people who would be up in arms against any politician proposing a radical overhaul of environmental regulations.

Are boomers really going to spend it all on luxury cruises and nursing homes?

Sure. Nursing homes, end of life care and healthcare costs in the last year of life. Those are heavy financial hits.

The Triumph of Janet (and follow-up with a mad Boomer who turned out to actually be called Janet ranting about the yoof at the Conservative party conference) has rapidly become the canonical British complaint against "Boomer Reality" after going viral on Substack.

A more intellectual version makes the case that the underlying problem is the moral failure of Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher thought that subsidising Boomer asset acquisition would cause the beneficiaries to become bourgeois and develop the bourgeois virtues, but it actually caused them to become landed gentry in denial and develop the gentlemanly vices (without the noblesse obilige or martial tradition that kept the real landed gentry safe from the guillotine). Sam Freedman sees the core belief that defines boomer reality as "the asset wealth I was subsidised to acquire is something I deserve because I am more virtuous than younger generations". At this level of generality, I think the argument applies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Thank you for those links. Really fits into my speculation.

Fifty years of civil rights law and affirmative action hadn't equalized blacks.

I think that if we simply had race-neutral policies that we would see equality after somewhere between 100 and 500 years.

I definitely agree with the last point- politically active millennials are disproportionately absolute loonies and everyone is afraid of the near-fossilized boomers losing power because as entertaining as a Marjorie Taylor green speakership would be no one wants it, while ‘the left eats its own’ cancel culture is that generation trying to seize power.

This also explains boomer opposition towards global warming. Global warming implies that car-centric culture might not be completely sustainable and anything that implies "boomer reality" might not be sustainable is an enemy.

People seem to overestimate how old the boomers actually are. Many are in their 60s, which is not that old. When they came of age in the 70s-80s, much of modernity was already extant. Cars and highways were already thoroughly mainstream and ubiquitous. But generally, people become more conservative as they get older due to a combination of society moving left-ward and changing personal beliefs. A 90s Clinton democrat could actually be considered a Republican today.

I'm pretty sure that even back in the '70s there was a growing perception in the West that their car-centric culture as it existed was not going to be completely sustainable, but I'm also sure that was entirely due to the oil crises and the appearance of Peak Oil theory, not global warming.

I have respect for Indians that build a fiefdom of convenience stores to pass to their children, it's obviously a different mentality than the "make sure you get a college degree and save enough in your 401k so you can retire."

The cruises aren't so much the issue, though. It's more the advent of modern healthcare means that an essentially limitless amount of cash can be consumed to extend a life at 0.01 QOL an extra 3 years, something that didn't exist in prior eras to anywhere near the extent.

Boomers are fundamentally narcissistic and they cannot imagine anyone else as main characters of life, not even their own children.

On this forum, one of our principals is that claims which are inflammatory should come with a greater amount of supporting evidence. Yet you've provided none.

I'm a millennial. This is ridiculous. There's no evidence that boomers are more narcissistic than any other generation. In fact, I would say they are less so than later generations.

There's not "no evidence" in the sense that you can certainly find papers claiming narcissism has decreased over time. However, you can also find ones saying that it is flat over time, or has increased over time. E.g. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_surprisingly_boring_truth_about_millennials_and_narcissism

In a foundational 2008 paper, Jean Twenge (coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic) and her colleagues reviewed 85 studies that surveyed more than 16,000 college students between 1979 and 2006... The researchers found that college students were becoming more narcissistic—by a full 30 percent from 1982 to around 2006. UC Davis’s Kali Trzesniewski and colleagues responded in 2008... The results indicated no change in narcissism... In yet another 2008 paper, Twenge and Joshua Foster re-analyzed data... they found that narcissism rose among both whites and Asians from 2002 to 2007. But because Asians tended to have lower narcissism scores in general, and the Asian population at UC campuses increased during the time period under scrutiny, the overall trend may have been obscured. Twenge and Foster also objected to the data that Trzesniewski and her coauthors had used... Further studies in 2009 and 2010 found no rise in narcissism. But a 2010 paper by Twenge and Foster objected to their methods... “The debate on changes in narcissism [is] seemingly settled,” Twenge and Foster wrote in 2010. “Seemingly” being the keyword: In late 2017, a new study appeared in Psychological Science that called all the previous ones into question... They found a “small and continuous decline” in narcissism throughout that time period.

The actual section is several paragraphs with a lot more details, but you get the gist. It then points out that the instrument used has a constant wording, which may be interpreted differently. Other sources don't provide a single simple answer, either, such as https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191210111655.htm or https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171115-millenials-are-the-most-narcissistic-generation-not-so-fast (which I think summarizes some of the same evidence as the first article).

On this forum, one of our principals is that claims which are inflammatory should come with a greater amount of supporting evidence.

Theory, meet practice. I'd be shocked if this post was modded.

I think it is more about the dissolution of regional distinctiveness, and lack of tolerance that follows from that, because every place and people is assumed to be the same, or should be.

My (boomer) mother grew up in a Southwestern American city with a lot of hispanics and very few blacks. She speaks Spanish badly, but my grandparents spoke it fluently (none of us are hispanic). When Bussing went into effect, she had to sit for an hour on a bus every day to move from one majority hispanic school to another, and the main change was not being able to invite her classmates over, because they lived too far away. Her opinion on bussing is that it may or may not have made sense in Alabama, but it was stupid and wasteful in her city. I took busses all the time as a teen, though they're hot and not very efficient. "Brown people" is a stupid category, but New Mexico and Arizona hispanics love their automobiles -- low riders, trucks, mechanic jobs, custom details, the whole package.

There was a woman in one of my social groups, born in Africa, went to a college in the Great Plains, living in a former Spanish colonial part of the American Southwest, going on about her experience as a Black American and her Blackness, and her sensitivity toward people curious about her background, and it was so very tiresome. None of her ancestors were American slaves, or suffered from redlining, or were discriminated against in any way. None of our ancestors owned a plantation. Nobody in our state was involved. And yet here we all were, unable to talk about any of our actual histories or the places we were actual from, because of her feelings of Blackness.

For a while, I lived with an Albanian family in rural Kosovo. Everyone was very nice to me, and I especially liked that I didn't have to drive or own a car at the time, and I could drink a 50c macchiato at a cafe over the course of an hour without anyone judging me for it. That was mostly because everyone was poor, though. They were upset over having their village shelled, and that for a while they had to teach their language in basements with only a single book for a room full of children. This may be peripherally related to pensioners, but it seems more related to feeling responsible for people who are deemed backwards. Which is, yes, also a problem in many American cities.

The American West has in some sense always wanted cars, even before they were invented. Horses were adopted with great enthusiasm the instant they arrived on the continent. And so were cars. Phoenix isn't full of cars and expansive, flat suburbs because of "boomers." It's full of cars and boomers and suburbs because it's in the middle of an enormous desert. Arizona spent 20 years building the CAP canal system, not for boomers to spread out (although they do), but because they're in the middle of an enormous desert. Boomers from Arizona and Texas drive RVs around for the same reason. i don't think this is necessarily grounded in unusual narcissism, but simply in unusually high wealth.

Thanks for your perspective.

When Bussing went into effect, she had to sit for an hour on a bus every day to move from one majority hispanic school to another, and the main change was not being able to invite her classmates over, because they lived too far away. Her opinion on bussing is that it may or may not have made sense in Alabama, but it was stupid and wasteful in her city.

My mom also has anecdotes about bussing an hour one way to a distant schools with slightly different racial proportions. For seemingly no benefit to anyone. Having heard various bussing anecdotes has put me in a very cynical mindset regarding technocratic solutions to social problems.

I would like to request an effort post in which all of the dubious medical claims made by Robert F Kennedy Jr. in his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience are examined, if false, refuted.

I had a baby last year. Within hours of birth the medical team tries to get you to give a baby a Hep B vaccine. I’d love to hear someone explain to me why this is necessary. A vaccine for a virus that has no plausible mechanism for infecting the vast majority of newborns in general and my child specifically. A virus that is almost exclusively found in homosexuals, prostitutes, and IV drug users. My wife had multiple STD tests during pregnancy, as do all pregnant women in under medical care. There is zero immediate risk of being infected. Negligible short to medium term risk.

Even if one were to make the case that this Hep B vaccine safe, so just go along to get along, I think we all have enough experience to know that many people feel lousy after a vaccine. I’d love to hear why it’s necessary within 12 hours of a baby’s life outside the uterus to trigger their immune system. Why do they insist on doing this immediately?

It’s really ludicrous.

I agree with this. Unlike MMR, which I have actively observed children suffering from, and are horrible for babies, some of the vaccines seem way too early.

You've seen children suffering from rabies?

"Measles, Mumps, Rubella."

Oh, whoops, thanks.

R = rubella

I have seen an infant with rubella. And he was suffering severely.

The young child vaccine I am most in favor of is Pertussis. There is nothing I have ever experienced worse than a child with whooping cough. It is insanely horrific even if the kid lives.

Thanks for clarifying.

My own country does it, but not till the infant is two months old:

Hepatitis B

Hepatitis B is caused by the hepatitis B virus. It is spread in the blood of an infected person.

It's a common infection worldwide. It is usually spread from infected pregnant women to their babies, or from child-to-child contact.

In rare cases, it can be spread through unprotected sex and injecting drugs.

Hepatitis B is uncommon in Ireland. Most cases are in people who got infected in another country.

Most adults infected with hepatitis B are able to fight off the virus. They usually recover from the infection within a couple of months.

But most people infected as children develop a long-term infection. This is chronic hepatitis B. It can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Antiviral medication can be used to treat it.

Vaccination against hepatitis B is recommended for people in high-risk groups, such as:

-healthcare workers

-people who inject drugs

-men who have sex with men

-children born to mothers with hepatitis B

-people travelling to parts of the world where the infection is more common

The hepatitis B vaccine is part of the routine immunisation programme for children.

I agree with other posters, probably this is the only time the medical staff can be sure of access to the baby if the mother doesn't follow up on routine check-ups later. Sure, you and your wife are clean and healthy, but can you be absolutely sure about that with regard to every other adult and child you may encounter?

There's a huge amount of vaccines and vaccinations in children since my day (they didn't even do the measles vaccination when I was a child) but I suppose that's because of increasing risk. Possibly also litigation - don't vaccinate the baby, baby gets sick, parents sue because hospital should have known and prevented it.

Can I point how gloriously contradictory the passage you quoted is? The rare cases of transmission are on the top of the vaccination priority list.

Right under healthcare workers?

I wouldn't read too much into it. Priority list isn't so important when we have enough to catch all infants, period.

Healthcare workers are legitimate in danger - they are always around blood. Which by default is suspicious. Children hep b should be quite rare when mothers are free from it.

Don't be crazy! It's just because that's the only time nearly 100% of babies are in the hospital. Being handled by... health care workers.

The stated reason for doing it in the first 24 hours is that sometimes the mother is not tested, or the test results are wrong, and administering the vaccine in the first 12 hours protects the baby. The second stated reason is that giving it immediately results in more people finishing the course.

ACIP recommends that all infants receive hepatitis B vaccine at birth, regardless of the infection status of the mother (11). Infants born to HBV-infected mothers require hepatitis B vaccine and hepatitis B immune globulin (HBIG) within 12 hours of birth to protect them from infection. However, because errors or delays in testing, reporting, and documenting maternal HBsAg status can and do occur, administering the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine soon after birth to all infants acts as a safety net, reducing the risk for perinatal transmission when maternal HBsAg status is either unknown or incorrectly documented at delivery. Also, initiating the hepatitis B vaccine series at birth has been shown to increase a child’s likelihood of completing the vaccine series on schedule

No other vaccines are given in the hospital, and many are far more important than hepatitis B for a newborn so the second reason is bunk. If there was a systemic problem in errors and reporting, then maybe they should fix that, rather than inject newborns. Obviously, the infants of women who have not been tested, or whose test results have not come back, or whose test results are lost, could be treated separately.

The real reason is that this vaccine is to protect a small group, not most people, and thus people have to be tricked or coerced into taking it for the benefit of the small group, as for most people, the vaccine is not a benefit. It remains primarily a sexually transmitted disease, so can wait until the usual vaccine schedule.

Older children can become infected through injection drug use or unprotected sex.

I suppose we could vaccinate the kids to prevent Hep B, or, adopt my preferred solution which is to minimize childhood IV drug use and all (not just the unprotected version) childhood sex before age 9 (The age we vaccinate for HPV, but insert whatever age you want here, but as a minimum, something that Julius would probably accept as reasonable).

A good parallel is the HPV vaccine. This does not benefit boys, but there are tenuous claims that it reduces anal cancer. This obviously is only an issue for the small subset of men who have sex with men (and women who have anal sex). However, the medical authorities claim spurious benefits for boys, rather than just being honest and saying that everyone taking it leads to herd immunity, so boys should get it to protect women. Medical ethics does not allow arguments like this, it seems, so instead they claim dubious things.

Furthermore, medical ethics is very much dominated by maximin thinking, protecting the most vulnerable, rather than utilitarian thinking. As a result, they suggest the HPV vaccine for 9 years olds, despite it lasting 5 years. 9-14 is not the window that will reduce the greatest number of infections, but middle (or earlier, as they are 9) schoolers are the most vulnerable, so the medical establishment favors them incorrectly, in my view. Different cultures and ethnicities have earlier and later onset of sexual activities, and age 9 is chosen to reduce cases in certain cultures, while later administration would work better for others.

Overall, the teenagers in the sample had a median age at first sex of 16.9 years. Black males had the lowest observed median (15.0), and Asian American males the highest (18.1); white and Hispanic males, and white and black females, reported similar ages (about 16.5 years).

The same applies to Hep B. It mainly affects MSM and IV drug users, in the US, but these are a vulnerable class, so it is the most important vaccine for the establishment to push - hence the only one that is mandated for newborns. They found a reason - the spurious claim that Hep B tests are sometimes wrong, and use this to push a vaccine that protects their favored group, the most vulnerable.

This kind of dishonesty is why people are dubious about vaccines. A system where boys were told to take HPV to protect their girlfriends, with the small benefit that it might make girls more like to engage in oral sex, will get just as many boys to take it, as lies about how it protects the boy. In fact, the "more oral sex from girls" promise is probably much more effective, save for the group of boys that actually needs it - those who engage in receptive anal sex. The medical establishment is uncomfortable with the idea of duty, and people doing something for the common good, as opposed to treatments that just help themselves.

Why do they insist on doing this immediately?

That's the only time nearly 100% of babies are guaranteed to be in the hospital.

It's part of the worldwide strategy to literally eradicate the disease. This has been relatively successful. Before that, it was several times more common, and hit a wider swath of society.

About 9,000 of the 18,000 children [per year, before the vaccine] infected in the first 10 years of life caught the virus from their mother during birth. However, many young children didn't catch the disease from their mother. They caught it from either another family member or someone else who came in contact with the child. Because hepatitis B can be transmitted by relatively casual contact with items contaminated with the blood of an infected person, and because many people who are infected with hepatitis B virus don't know that they have it, it is virtually impossible to be "careful enough" to avoid this infection.

50% of kids weren't getting it from their mothers, and I doubt they were shooting up or having gay sex. They got a little bloody or handled someone's razor. I wouldn't want to go back to those days. Not for the sake of a couple days discomfort.

They got a little bloody or handled someone's razor.

Kids get scrapes and cuts all the time. Little Johnny and Billy are playing together, Billy falls and cuts his knee, passes on infection to Johnny.

This is a little low-effort on your part. "Someone please write a post for me" should probably be a Small Scale Questions Sunday post, and not a top level CW thread post.

I think it's been I dunno, a year or so since I promoted one of my interviews here (that included Yassine Meskhout and TW), so I wanted to link The Motte to my talk with Alex Hochuli of Aufhebunga Bunga podcast. Part 1 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=6OiZUUGNOr0) gets into - and this is mostly me here, not Alex - the turn in market thinking away from sunny, Milton Friedman-esque universalism and towards elitist and/or nationalist framings. Think the Hanania-esque or Caplanian disdain for the masses combined with a love of Jeff Bezos...whose companies serve the dumb masses. (Someone like Brink Lindsey otoh, representing the older right-liberal think tank crowd, still has affection for Joe Consumer Citizen.) As if the new point of capitalism is to give those of us with high human capital a properly challenging space to achieve, as a role model for us all perhaps, not to provide Count Chocula cereal. Objective standards vs. relativism of the market is also touched on.

In part 2 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=VUlgKio5f7k) we discuss the role of ideology: How viable is trying to be non-ideological? South American vs. Western left/right politics and the notion of false consciousness or citizens' latent revolutionary potential are also broached, among other things.

See too my interview with Anton Cebalo, author of last year's somewhat viral "The Social Recession": https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers

Part 1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dhbq3JxOrg

Part 2: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HGlkuScNNRg

My whole channel: https://youtube.com/@champagnebulge1/videos

Milton Friedman-esque universalism and towards elitist and/or nationalist framings. Think the Hanania-esque or Caplanian disdain for the masses combined with a love of Jeff Bezos...whose companies serve the dumb masses. (Someone like Brink Lindsey otoh, representing the older right-liberal think tank crowd, s

it's part of the pendulum swinging back after the populist-right seemed to dominate online from 2015-2020 or so under Trump. these anti-populist and anti-nationist conservatives were being left out of discourse, but it's not like they went away.

The people at e.g. Palladium magazine are an example of the more nationalist but less populist High Right theme I'm getting at here.

Could someone who is better versed than I in medicine give feedback about the recent claim that Pfizer "observed 1.6 million adverse events covering nearly every organ system" in vaccine-takers?

The original document: https://tkp.at/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/3.PSUR-1.pdf

My instinct is that there is probably some way in which this number is being blown out of proportion by vaccine skeptics. However, I would not be competent to really evaluate this document without doing quite a bit of work. Maybe someone here is better placed to evaluate it?

That PDF is 400 pages long and not text-searchable, but it's obvious from the order of magnitude that this must be something like "every recorded medical event in tens/hundreds of millions of people" and completely meaningless without comparison to base rates.

That would be my guess as well. In addition, these likely reflect reports rather than any sort of confirmed illness (edit: I would guess coming from https://vaers.hhs.gov/). In attempting to make its point seem stronger, in my opinion, it actually makes it weaker: how could a single vaccine (not even a new idea, just a different way of making them) causes eye injuries (something the article itself admits is unusual for a vaccine), vascular disorders, skin and tissue, ears, respiratory, breast or reproductive... the list goes on. It also is clearly doing the thing of "Big! Numbers!" by pointing to the number of different categories, even though looking at the list a "category" may be extremely specific, such as differentiating "vaccination site pain" "...swelling" "...discomfort" and then repeating them all for "vaccination site joint X".

Oh yeah, and the author is also advertising their book, which looks like a very reasonable and dispassionate review of scientific evidence.

how could a single vaccine...

That part isn't really surprising at all. The theory is that the spike protein itself is what's extremely toxic in covid, and it's going to cause a variety of illnesses once you inject people with MRNA to generate massive amounts of spike protein.

I'm no doctor, but this claim doesn't explain anything to me. The spike protein is in COVID, that's the whole point. AFAIK COVID doesn't cause anywhere near this range of symptoms, and if it did, it would be vastly more dangerous than most vaccine skeptics seem to think. Just because something is "toxic" doesn't mean it causes literally every symptom imaginable.

As is usual I disagree with all the major factions involved. The most likely place to find any risks associated with COVID vaccines is in the delivery mechanism and how this necessarily functions differently from the virus, not in the spike protein.

For Pfizer that delivery mechanism is a payload that codes for the spike protein encased in a lipid nanoparticle. This causes two differences from how getting covid works. The first and most obvious is the lipid nanoparticle itself. The second, much less frequently noted but probably more important, is that the lipid nanoparticle can deliver the payload to a different distribution of cells than OG covid. This is enough to put forward a plausible hypothesis for a very wide range of side effects, though the key word here is hypothesis.

To make a comparison to something that's probably more clear-cut, the AstraZeneca heart issue risks (which US anti-vaccine commentary missed because that vaccine was never deployed in significant numbers in the US) are likely caused by how it's delivery mechanism, an adenovirus viral vector, interacts with the Coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor, which is expressed in cardiac muscle and involved in all sorts of heart problems including myocarditis.

It makes sense to me that the vaccine could cause very different symptoms than COVID itself. It's not the most intuitive, but it wouldn't be the weirdest fact about biology by far. However, I'm still very skeptical that the vaccine could cause hundreds of different syndromes covering every single system in the human body. Is there any single cause that causes such a wide variety of medical symptoms?

Inflammation from widely distributed nanoparticles. Look up inflammation, its complicated.

This looks like it's something from Europe and I don't know much about that. In the U.S. the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System exists and my understanding is that it's basically a log of any clinically significant adverse events that happen to someone in a certain timeframe after vaccination. Doctors and members of the public can report these adverse events, and it's not required that they know the vaccine caused the event. This data is useful if you contrast it with base rates for particular conditions and demographics, e.g. if men 18-24 are showing up with myocarditis in the VAERS system much more often than they are in the general population of hospital admits. Looking at the raw total of VAERS events isn't helpful since the purpose is to do broad data collection about adverse events occuring after vaccination whether or not they can be definitively traced to the vaccine.

My guess is that this is something similar, that there were 1.6 million reported adverse events in some population of European vaccine takers but that doesn't tell you anything unless you contrast it with base rates.

We have a joke in the field that goes something like this: if you get hit by a truck while testing a new drug those Super Bowl advertisements are going to start saying "may cause you to get run over."

This exaggeration but not by a lot.

As you say, OP's data is meaningless without more context.

Wasn't "being struck by lightning" an adverse event included in Pfizer's phase III clinical trial of the BioNTech COVID vaccine?

We’re still waiting for one of your high-effort “Inferential Distance” posts to produce a single new insight or argument that hasn’t already been repeated by you in tons of smaller comments over the years. This was literally just a long-winded (and full of misspelled words and poor grammar) restatement of the exact same argument you’ve made 10,000 times.

You mock people who want to “consoom product” on the one hand, but on the other hand the only new content you produced in this post is extolling the supposedly profound insights of two massively-popular Hollywood films.

You brought up the Wittgenstein quote about how if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Well, the lion also would not understand us! We could maybe glean an interesting window into the thought processes of an alien mind, if we really cared to listen and to parse things out over iterated conversations; meanwhile, there are entire constellations of subject matter which intelligent humans could try and make the lion comprehend - particle physics, the principles of compound interest, comparative linguistics - and he just wouldn’t have any hope of grasping any of it. Firstly because his brain simply does not have anywhere near the level of raw computing power that even a below-average human’s brain does, but also because he would find all of it utterly uninteresting and would not bother to try and grasp it.

I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka. But I am saying that your posts on this topic grow more and more tedious each time, because you continue to fail to demonstrate that you’re even making a cursory attempt to understand, or learn anything from, or synthesize, any of the counterarguments we offer. You can shout “identity politics is bullshit” three trillion times into the void, but if every time some smart person offers a sophisticated rebuttal and you don’t integrate that rebuttal into your worldview at all, people will justifiably begin to lose interest in you.

We’re still waiting for one of your high-effort “Inferential Distance” posts to produce a single new insight or argument that hasn’t already been repeated by you in tons of smaller comments over the years. This was literally just a long-winded (and full of misspelled words and poor grammar) restatement of the exact same argument you’ve made 10,000 times.

Yeah dude, do you get tired of @SecureSignals constantly reiterating the same talking points over and over 10,000 times? Or do you eagerly wait for his next epistle on why you should hate the Jews?

This is not a mod warning, because you're allowed to criticize people and tell them you don't like their posts, but it's borderline, because if all you have to say is "I don't like you and I don't like your posts," maybe you should just skip them instead of writing a tirade. You get a pass because at least you picked at a few specific things to refute. But I also noted the "I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka" apophasis.

But I also noted the "I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka" apophasis.

This was not an apophasis at all, but merely a way to proactively head off that interpretation at the pass. I understood the way that the lion analogy might be perceived, and I was genuinely attempting to make clear that the intent was not to call Hlynka stupid. I have made no secret that I find Hlynka’s oeuvre tedious and of very little intellectual value, but I don’t think it’s because he’s not smart enough to do better. If I thought he was too dumb to learn, I wouldn’t keep replying to him in an attempt to get him to learn.

Say what you will about SecureSignals, but every time somebody refutes or challenges on of his points, he has a well-sourced and effortful response that addresses the specifics of the challenge. I myself have argued with him multiple times, and I’ve explicitly told him that he has failed to adequately meet challenges to some of his claims. He also has many users here who take shots at his claims, and who are far more knowledgeable about the subject matter than I am; are you suggesting that I’m not allowed to argue with Hlynka unless I also spend equal time arguing with every other user?

a well-sourced and effortful response

Mostly, he has responses full of lies and terribly-sourced claims. I'll take someone writing about their own beliefs over someone distracting away from their lies with even more lies any day.

I'm sympathetic to the institution of Gen X gnostic angst, but you have to do what every reasonable skeptic does and apply this to your own ideas.

Okay yes nothing is real we're just living through simulacra and buying furniture designed by committees of people whose idea of a human being is a bunch of noisy statistics made by some Marxist that slept through their statistical methods courses. This has literally only become worse since The Matrix.

The West is living a lie that's only maintained by a tower of abstractions that survives on creating more abstraction and nothing else. Collapse is locked in and it's not that people are asleep at the wheel, there's not even a wheel anymore.

But then, people have been saying this for decades now and things have not collapsed. The lie just gets worse and more detached from reality, seemingly without consequence. Clown world marches on over Baudrillard's corpse.

How do you reckon with this?

Strangely you seem to be able to find this problem when Russia is involved. And like many of your countrymen are eager to point out that despite the West living a complete lie, so is Russia and so is China. Just different kinds of lie. The one the other country believes being always the most ludicrous for everybody.

Consider that the Africans you see as practical are living their own kind of lie, and that what you consider resourcefulness may just be adaptation to that different kind of lie.

Also how does any of this relate to your premise of explaining why you constantly seem to accuse people of believing the opposite of what they claim to believe?

Is it really just that you think one's own mindreading of people is the true measure of character because selfid is bull? Because the one thing this does not apply to is politics. Because politics, literally all of it, is coalition building. Even at its best ideology is nice window dressing for a convergence of interests, and at its worst it's nerd bait to keep a meme in cold storage until it's useful again. It doesn't have to make sense. Hell it's better in many ways if it doesn't. In any case the language of truth is as suited to it as empiricism is to theology.

There is such a thing as truth, but politics is the one realm where it's almost completely useless. There is a good moral argument to be made that you should still abide by it ultimately, but if you only think and act in those terms you're going to lose.

The progs may be talking nonsense, but they are still better than you at the actual game being played, because unlike you they know the rules. And yeah sure playing to win means everything burns to the ground because moral righteousness doesn't grow crops. But that's always what happens. And Lysenko died of old age while Vavilov died in prison.

I mean first of all, winning a bullshit game is kind of meaningless. If I’m the best Calvinball player who ever lived, it’s nonsense because Calvinball has nothing to do with reality. Games that are real matter. At worst, Calvinball playing is a horrid distraction from the baseball game that’s actually meaningful. That baseball game is the practical real world problems being ignored to play identity games. Roads and infrastructure need fixing, education needs overhaul, people are not doing so well economically, Russia and China. These are real problems, but we don’t care about them because Dylan visited the White House in a dress and held up a beer can on instagram.

I’ll agree that our current name-and-claim version of identity is largely bullshit. Identity is a social label often given in response to a person’s place in society. Asians are not honorary whites they simply don’t fit what minority means in modern, WEIRD culture, which is that a person’s minority status is seen (wrongly imo) as a lower status to be fixed. Asians are not seen as lower status. That doesn’t mean honorary white, it means higher status. My identities are formed in contradistinction to others or in response to roles I take. I’m not a mother and cannot become one without having children. I am an aunt because my siblings have children. I’m a worker because I have a boss. The best metaphor to me has always been a status effect, not a class. It’s based on something outside of your skull.

winning a bullshit game is kind of meaningless

Not if the victors get to rob and kill the vanquished it isn't.

What you're complaining about isn't that the game is meaningless really, but that people care more about winning than making sure you can continue to play in the future.

My point is, it doesn't matter because if you don't win right now you don't get to play in the future anyways. Because you're dead and poor.

Of course this isn't stable, you can't have people defect like this forever, but this is how and why societies collapse. Focus on internal rather than external conflict, widespread erosion of norms, etc.

What people seem to often miss though is that this is the result of a series of rational decisions.

If you don't fight the meaningless social issue game, if you don't give citizenship to sympathetic foreigners, if you don't loot the treasury to give spoils; you will not get to keep power versus someone who can and does those things. Using power to gain more power at any cost is a practically superior strategy to any other which is why anyone that has power is inexorably attracted to it or replaced by people who are.

The one flaw, or saving grace, is that power is cursed and by accumulating it you will eventually reach a point where you have too much of it and the distance to reality becomes great enough that you destroy yourself.

The best metaphor to me has always been a status effect, not a class. It’s based on something outside of your skull.

You're just laying out the principles of any good model of the world, what naturalists call science.

There is no disagreeing with this.

Except, unfortunately, in the one game where you get to rob and kill the losers. Where this attachement to the truth falls easily pray to the more immediately expedient strategy of seeking power and using it to eliminate the competition.

Connecting this game and truth seeking is basically what the Enlightenment did by inventing scientific government, and though we've gained tremendous boons from it, I think it was ultimately an evil act precisely because now that this connection exists, it has become impossible to have either proper government or proper truth seeking.

Here I am reading Nietzsche like a chump where I just consume popular culture like Fight Club to learn how we are socialized into obidient little slaves to the "Machine". All that to have the fleeting experience of escaping the cave of our social conditioning we have known for over two millenia. Catching a glimpse of the outside and then heading right back into our schackles staring at the shadows because we think that there is nothing more to be learned. But alas there is...

The machine/system/society strives towards totalitarianism through techonology, even if the technology doesn't work in reality. To quote "Industrial Society and Its Future" from the recently deceased Theodore Kaczynski

But it is not in the interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest possible extent.

Every piece of media you have quoted is only there to give you glimpse of the truth and then having you heading back into the cave to service the machine. I have also learned a glimpse of the truth but I have no intention of stopping trying to learn more.

Re Africa — judge them by their fruits. Either intelligence isn’t really helpful to building prosperity or the Africans aren’t that intelligent.*

*On a large enough time scale.

Intelligence is helpful, it just isn't sufficient. African kingdoms have been prosperous before (at least in a similar way to other old civilizations, which is to say, they had rich rulers and impressive art, even if the average person's life sucked). But building truly prosperous societies, in the sense of benefiting a large portion of the people, is incredibly difficult. What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace--is probably closer to many ancient societies that we now glorify as being important steps on the road to civilization, than the latter are to what we have today.

they had rich rulers

There is no question, that Mansa Musa, King of Mali, was immensely rich.

impressive art

This is more questionable. Here are some highlights from Met. Which do you consider impressive?

What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace

The model African model of a strong man extracting wealth is only possible because of Western (or recently Chinese) trade. The ruler can now exchange what he takes from his people for useful things. Prior to being able to trade with the developed world, there was little reason to oppress the populace as they had nothing (save some daughters) that was particularly worth much to the ruler. It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.

This is more questionable

I can only assume that you don't consider Egypt to be "Africa" if you are questioning the impressiveness of African art and architecture.

It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.

Rulers have been extracting wealth probably since rulers and concentrated societies existed. This review agrees with you that it is difficult, but it seems an exaggeration to say that Africans couldn't figure it out until the past few centuries. Unless I'm wrong, but if Africa also lacks anything worth anything worth stealing, maybe that contributes to its lack of developed nations?

I can only assume that you don't consider Egypt to be "Africa" if you are questioning the impressiveness of African art and architecture.

When HBD proponents talk about “Africa” we are pretty much exclusively referring to sub-Saharan/“black” Africa. Egypt, Carthage, and other historical North African superstates were Semitic or Semitic-adjacent, and part of the Mediterranean world, not the “African” world as most people intend it when doing comparative history like this.

Ok, but the Northern part of Africa is still incredibly dysfunctional and poor today, so it still seems to present a question about what makes people capable of building civilization which can't be answered by reference to inherent intelligence. I don't know enough about the ancient history of sub-Saharan Africa specifically, but I do know that Botswana has seemingly dodged most of the problems plaguing its neighbors and is substantially richer than Egypt today.

The northern part of Africa today has basically no genetic continuity with ancient Egypt or Carthage; Northern African countries are overwhelmingly Arab, due to the Arab conquests of the seventh century under the Umayyad and Rashidun Caliphates. I agree with you that hereditary IQ is not the entire story of why many MENA countries are as poor and dysfunctional as they are, but trying to link them to the ancient Mediterranean empires of the Bronze and Iron Ages doesn’t make any sense either, since there’s little to no genetic carry-over between then and now.

But the ancient Arab world didn't lack large and rich cities, centralized empires, writing, art, mathematics, etc. either. Even today some Arab countries have most of those things; yes, it's unsustainable decadence due to oil rather than true economic development, but they still managed to maintain a reasonably stable government, something resembling property rights, etc.

Actually, Arabs are Semitic, so yes the current inhabitants of North Africa are not directly descended from pharaohs or Carthaginians, but they aren't that distantly related either.

This scene in particular

Don't take it as a personal criticism when I say that I hate shit like this.

This naive optimism of "rah rah face the pain, ride the tiger, you'll come out stronger for it". For the most part, this line is only repeated by people who have never faced true terror before. People who haven't faced up to the gravity of the problem.

Now, I am not saying that we should simply crumple in the face of tragedy, or that it would be better if we could simply eliminate it. There is a tension that I must navigate here because, as I have intimated elsewhere, my fundamental project is to argue, contra utilitarianism, for the necessity of (the possibility of) pain, even terrible pain, even the worst pain, as a precondition of anything that could be called "meaningful". But I recognize full well that this is a fundamentally insane proposition, at least prima facie. Any person with any sense at all should be running for the safety of the experience machine once they comprehend what horrors are "out there", in "reality". Overcoming this eminently reasonable proposition will require the marshaling of the most advanced and subtle resources at our disposal. This puerile pollyannaism of "ah, bring it on, I can handle it, because I'm tough!" is simply not up to the task. There is a limit point where things simply break. Only beyond this limit does the problem of pain actually begin to present itself.

Consider the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, an Austrian woman who was imprisoned by her own father in the basement of their house for 24 years. She was never once allowed to leave her prison chamber in that time period. She was raped repeatedly and delivered several children while in captivity.

Would you go to her in that basement and tell her "stay with the pain, don't shut this out"? Would you tell her "what you're feeling is premature enlightenment"?

She did end up surviving and is doing remarkably well now, but of course she would have had no way of knowing that while the ordeal was actually going on. As the years ticked on, she would have faced nothing but crushing uncertainty every day, the knowledge that every day could be her last. And of course she just as easily could have died; there could have been no happy ending. What then? In that case, there are no scars to serve as monuments of your victories; there is only a terrible waste of life.

fascism is a fundamentally progressive ideology. [...] They want to quibble some group's position within the intersectional stack rather than question the validity of the stack as a concept. They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show".

As has been pointed out to you multiple times, the policy prescriptions proposed by the far right and progressives are wildly different. Fascists want to railroad women into being housewives, they want to make pornography and other types of sexual "deviancy" illegal, and they want to build a wall to keep immigrants out. Progressives don't want these things. The two camps want to build two different types of societies that are obviously different and would feel different to live in. Given these numerous disagreements, any assertion of similarity between the two ideologies in terms of alleged shared metaphysical or epistemological presuppositions seems rather moot.

Can you give a quick rundown of what your alternative looks like? What is your proposed belief system that does not depend on these concepts like "group difference" that you find problematic?

Isn’t this merely arguing the difference in aims is sufficient to say progressivism and fascism is different even if the methodology / thought process is the same?

If we are talking about movies, I think the progressive / fascist mind is the Alliance whereas the libertarian or perhaps conservative mindset is Mal’s in serenity. Specifically this scene https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VR3Av9qfZc

The aims are what matter in a political system. People will be more subservient to the aims than to the method. Frequently, one’s choice of method is just a post hoc rationalization of one’s pre-reflective, extra-rational aims.

Immediately in the wake of Hegel’s death you had left Hegelians, who ultimately spawned Marxism, and right Hegelians, who were politically conservative. Both claimed to be following Hegel’s dialectical method, but they had radically different aims. Any analysis that claimed that the left and right Hegelians were somehow “the same” because they both claimed to be inspired by Hegel would obviously be missing the point. They’re obviously not the same, because one side wanted a communist revolution and the other didn’t.

Aims matter to a degree. While not quite the same, there is an almost red queen problem for progressivism/ fascism. They believe they are playing chess but don’t realize even the pawns make moves on their own.

So both systems run into the problem that the outcomes are due to human actions but not human design. Thus the aims may become much less important than the actions and the kind of actions.

the outcomes are due to human actions but not human design.

I’ll ask you the same question I asked Hlynka: what is your alternative, an alternative that avoids these problems that are allegedly shared by progressivism and fascism?

I don’t really understand what your comment is getting at here, but maybe you can help me understand by giving me an example.

I think there is some benefit to “riding the tiger” in a controlled way. It builds the muscles that let you face the worst. It’s really pretty obvious. We’ve never had it so good, yet we have so much anxiety and depression that we didn’t have back before this kind of living was possible.

In my view, the confidence and ability to handle what life throws at you is a muscle. The people who can bounce back from terrible things, failures, and disappointment are people who have done exactly that on a small scale and in safe circumstances. This is why athletes do so well in life. They’ve learned how to win, how to brush off a loss, and (depending on the sport) that a little pain isn’t fatal. These things pay dividends because, first of all, being able to learn to bounce back from failure and setbacks also teaches that setbacks are not permanent. A kid who doesn’t make the team this year tries again next year. And often in the process learns the values of hard work and preparation— because quite often the reason he didn’t make the team was that he hadn’t worked on his weaknesses enough. Either way, learning to fail and try again makes the idea of bouncing back after a setback possible in his mind.

Can we not abuse the metaphor of "riding the tiger"? The significant thing about riding the tiger isn't that it's difficult, it's that once you start it's really damn dangerous to stop (because the tiger will eat you).

I couldn't help but think about this comment when reading Tyler Cowen's latest post. A modern academic, normally completely sequestered from the realities of life and death, existential struggle, catches a glimpse of multi-agent games.

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.

That being said, I once read something by a prolific HBD poster on Twitter or Substack who I can't recall, who made an argument about why black people, despite significantly lower IQs than average, still seem to function much better than that low value would suggest:

When most people benchmark mental retardation, they implicitly consider the case of retarded white people, the majority of who have some kind of developmental or neurological disorder that's dragging them down. They're not just stupid, they're non-functional in important regards.

Whereas an 70 IQ African is not sick, they're just dumb, but are much more capable of social interaction and productive endeavors than the former, though they can't hope to match 100 IQ people of any race.

I believe that person showed anecdotes from special needs tard wranglers who noticed how the black kids were better behaved and apparently smart than the white ones, because they simply were much better functioning overall despite their identically low IQ scores.

I contend that a healthy chimp can beat a bad case of Downs in almost everything, even if they're both terrible at IQ tests. One is an animal well honed to its niche, whereas the other is simply outright defective.

So, African society and culture evolved to be well adapted to lower IQs, and they're not as clearly dysfunctional as you'd expect.

Leaving that aside, in desperately poor countries, like most of Africa, people need to be able to hustle or starve, they don't have well trodden paths ahead of them that they can follow as long as they're competent and come out ahead. While hustling is certainly a laudable thing, I suspect that if the world went to shit and we had to start from scratch, the median Mottizen would spank their asses.

Indians speak 2 or 3 languages because that brings clear and massive utility to them, presumably the same case for Africans who need some more. On the other hand, most Americans can speak English from the cradle to the grave and do just fine, so it's by no means their failure that they don't bother to do so most of the time. In their place, I wouldn't either.

You don't judge Bill Gates by the standards of Stone Age persistence hunters and get all perplexed that he has wealth and high status despite his abysmal inability to run a marathon.

I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.

I don't think this necessarily follows, unless you want to look at Europe after Rome left, and declare the Europeans must have naturally crazy low intelligence as well (or, I suppose you could argue that the difference can be made up in 1000 years).

Based on the my observation of the middle-ages, it seems pretty reasonable that the former territories to struggle amongst themselves in a series of constantly escalating conflicts until a distaste for war is (quite literally) beat into the local culture enough to outweigh the natural human drive to see your out-group killed (at least enough to stop fighting with people within a few hundred km). This seems to take several hundred years (it could possibly be faster with increased communication speed, but the power vacuum in Africa is only 60-80 years old, so I'm not willing to write off the theory yet).

It's only at that point that you can build infrastructure and complicated supply lines that complex societies are built on. Before that, I would only expect high-intelligence to result in more efficient killing.

Alternatively a single victor/foreign power can come in and dominate (your classic pax X-ana period). The point is more that stability seems to come from either subjugation or deep cultural changes that seem to be orthogonal to intelligence.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're entirely wrong, but I think looking at the state of an area for a single 50-100 year period is a horrible argument about the IQ of the humans that live there.

tard wranglers

Leave off the rdrama/4chanisms, please.

Aww, can't a man enjoy himself sometimes? I'd like to think that almost all my posts are still net positive :(

But as you wish.

I'd like to think that almost all my posts are still net positive

They are, that's why this is more of a "tut tut" than a real warning.

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

Hlynka confusing extroversion with intelligence once again.

Africans do pretty poor on real-life tasks "realizing witchcraft isn't real" and "whether having sex with virgin cures you of AIDS".

You're a military man. So tell me why McNamara's moron corps were bad at real-life tasks they were assigned, and damaging to other units' morale even though all what they were different is just worse result on paper-and-pencil test?

number of languages spoken

Do you believe if we compelled children to learn multiple languages at gunpoint they'd be any smarter? Compelling vaccinating children makes them healthier, at least for most vaccines.

Hlynka confusing extroversion with intelligence once again.

The extroverts are the people that you'll interact with when you go to east Africa, so there's some selection bias.

The Africans are higher in extroversion than Europeans, esp Northern ones. (~Americans)

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

This isn't just wrong, it's antagonistically wrong. You do not understand what intelligence is. You do not understand what identity or progressivism is either. By your own epistemology, I don't even have to back this up with any kind of serious reasoning or source, I can just state and restate it, likening it to some pop-culture concepts (in an admittedly artful way).

But since I have a better and clearer method of thought, I'll explain. Intelligence is not whether you can hustle or are observationally aware, or can speak many languages. A meercat can be observationally aware. Intelligence is the capacity for abstraction, logic, planning, critical thinking and so on. It's precisely and ironically what you're doing and what the median East African is not doing. Even if you go by Taleb's 'intelligence is about making money rather than passing tests' concept, we can be confident that East Africa is not a particularly intelligent place. If East Africans are so smart, why aren't they living like kings on a programming salary (as many motte posters do)? Why aren't people sifting through Africa for cheap programming talent, as is done in India or Eastern Europe?

Societies composed of intelligent people have enormous amounts of machinery to do their work for them. Societies composed of unintelligent people murder their children in witchcraft rituals to this very day: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-02/witchcraft-child-sacrifice-uganda-victims/11248026

As for 'fascism is progressive', not in any useful way. Would a fascist agree with a liberal that 'there is a role for politics in improving society'? Yes, of course. But the ideas they support are totally different, based on different values and goals, with a wildly different understanding of what improving society looks like.

Furthermore, when most people say progressive, they mean the blue-haired they/them, not the SS officer. Calling fascists progressive introduces unnecessary confusion and anger. Even more confusion is added by reactionaries, who are in some ways progressive (in wanting a radical change to society) and other ways reactionary, wanting to go back. We should classify political beliefs by their goal, not in their desire to change things.

Finally, everyone is progressive from some point of view. Say you're against child sacrifice to appease the spirits and want some kind of political action to prevent it. You're seeking a progressive stance in certain parts of Uganda! Every institution we have today was progressive once. Even you are a progressive, you just want a different direction and mode of travel to other people. Do you see how the meaning you have assigned the word becomes worthless and shallow?

Identity politics is similar. It exists. It is political. America or China might well be an 'imagined community' full of people who feel solidarity with eachother, yet they are still enormously powerful entities. People will rally around the flag, a piece of fabric with some ink on it. People will fight and die for their identity. It can't get much more real than that! You can't just smear it as being bullshit when identity rules the world, forms the world, is the substance that social structures are made of.

As for 'fascism is progressive', not in any useful way.

I liked most of your post, but this I totally disagree with. Progressives basically agree with fascists on tactics, and delude themselves in some ways to convince themselves they don't also agree on policy. The only real difference is a who/whom not on what prescriptions are to be once you figure out who is the baddie. Its always centralized power with plausible deniability when everything goes pear shaped.

Identity politics is bullshit. [...] look upon each particular thing and ask what is it's nature? IE what does it do? where does it come from? How does it behave? The answers you get are what that thing is.

As I understand it identity politics caught on as an alternative to class politics. It was a means for the left to scoop up the various previously un/under-represented minorities in an effort to gather enough extra votes to tip the scales in their favour. In the 1970s politics was class politics with labour unions playing a significant role. Then Reagan and Thatcher came along, crushed the unions and identity politics followed. It had little to nothing to do with what you "identified as" and lots to everything to do with who you voted for. It was about politics, not identity, and although the academic material and its derivatives that explore identity are 99% socially corrosive bullshit the political appeal is arguably pragmatic, albeit on a short-term and short-sighted basis.

It seems to me your point is that people from outside the left have adopted the identity lens with the difference being that they largely denigrate the minorities to flatter the majority. This has taken over from the socially synthesising MLK colour blindism and classical albeit imperfect liberalism that preceded the idpol era. Well, yeah. You can't form an ingroup without creating an outgroup. This is what has always baffled me about the identity politics of the true believers rather than the pollsters. It makes sense for the majority to adopt idpol, they're the majority. The minority are at a democratic disadvantage by definition, and the only way it worked/works is that it depended on the majority adhering to fuzzy social liberalism while the minorities rally around their flag/s. Once the idpol mindset takes root in the wider discourse, even if it's just via objection to it, you get the opposing side being drawn onto the pitch and you start to see MRAs, HBDists, trans denialists, principled free speech trolls and so on take up position. And if the idpol nonsense gets too fevered you arrive at the yeschad.jpg ethno-nationalism of white people, after having been identified as such externally, coming to a position where they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. It ain't pretty.

In summary the idpol left promoted it, the minorities adopted it, the classical liberals and class-first left adapted to it and the majority are progressively shifting from passively accepting it to being boxed into actively adopting it in kind. It's less The Matrix's "you think that's air you're breathing" and more the fish noticing the water it's been swimming in. It's less red pill vs blue pill and more black pill vs white pill.

Identity, to the degree that it represents something meaningful and real, exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified.

Quite, and like the saying goes just because you do not take an interest in [identity] politics doesn't mean [identity] politics won't take an interest in you.

In 2020, Biden said somewhat infamously words to the effective of ‘if you ain’t voting Biden you ain’t black.’ That is, he said the quiet part out loud that politicians viewed identity as downstream of political affiliation.

That seems consistent with your post.

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

I don't think this statement is in any way banworthy, but it is rather ironic. Because you're basically arguing the "multiple types of intelligence" theory, which is just a step away from blank slateism (everyone is equally talented and has equal potential, just in different ways).

It reminds me of something. Ah yes-

Gathering knowledge of abstract items, from words to equations, that have no relation to our everyday lives has long been the amusement of the leisured elite. Relegating the non-elite to the basement of intellect because they do not know as many abstractions has been the conceit of the elite.

What if we measured literacy by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environment: how much individuals knew all those complex equations and verbal and nonverbal vocabularies of their everyday life?

What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual’s mind is to self-critique and new ideas?

Given that you seem to be echoing Ibram X. Kendi, maybe there is something to your theory that a lot of right-wingers are actually just parroting woke ideas.

I don't know if I have the right to call myself a Mottizen, but I'm not getting bent out of shape about this and I certainly didn't take Hlynka to be saying we're all stupid.

There's book smarts and street smarts, and the East African guy probably has a ton more street smarts to survive in his environment whereas we'd be robbed, rolled, knifed, and left in the gutter if we were plonked down there.

Plus, me am stupid too so I can't object to the characterisation, and I've had people call me dumb in online exchanges much more directly because I wouldn't kiss their... shoes about their special snowflakeness.

😁

If you want to get Hlynka banned, man up about it (even if you identify as female) and ask for it directly instead of doing the "Mommy, he said mean word about me!" dance.

Amadan seemed unable to see this, so I was attempting to enlighten him. It failed, as it usually does.

Oh hey, now I know who you are. Just like old times, I guess.

Anyway, the point is not whether a statement is, in theory, banworthy. Of course you could construe the quoted words as being banworthy. Fortunately for everyone, "use the most pedantic interpretation that could be considered a violation of one or more rules" is not how we do things.

I don't know if I have the right to call myself a Mottizen

Is there any right needed besides being on here? You have over a thousand comments, not many can say that.

The statement implies that most posters here on TheMotte.org are mentally retarded (in the sense that their IQ is less than 70, which I presume is room temperature). That is a personal attack on people reading this and would normally be the subject of a ban.

I don't think you are being ingenuous. If you read his entire post, he's very clearly not saying he thinks most posters on the Motte have sub-70s IQs. His entire point is that IQ is not a reliable measure of "intelligence." Agree with him or don't, but engage with what he's actually saying.

I did read his whole point and I know that was what he was arguing. That does not make the quoted piece not offensive if taken out of context.

Then don't take it out of context.

They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show". In other words they still think that's air they are breathing.

No, I think the studies are only necessary to argue with people that reject what's in front of their own eyes. You see it as clear that Africans are actually more intelligent than Motteposters. OK, if we redefine the word to mean something other than typical usage, that's probably true, so you'll get no argument from me, other that my usual quibble that I find it irritating when people use words in non-standard ways and insist that they're actually more correct than the standard. Whatever. At the end of the day, my position that living around large numbers of people of African ancestry sucks isn't based on what studies show or academic consensus, it's on looking at places I've been to and observing that I'd rather live near the Scandinavians. I think most people can see that just as easily, but to argue with someone that insists up and down that they don't really see the difference, I can pull data on productivity and murder rates, but that's still just a proxy for my sincerely held position that it's obvious to all that it's better to be surrounded by a bunch of Dutch, Swedes, and Germans than a bunch of Somalis. If someone points out that those designations are just, like, a construct man, I'm left to roll my eyes and move on.

It's a long post, but it doesn't say much; largely it's an extended sneer. Yes, we who oppose progressive politics know the framework is bullshit. We know that if you attempt to dig through the morass of contradictions that it claims as principles and internal logic that you will find either nothing or just power politics -- "who/whom". And yes, it is true that much of the online right comes from a progressive (though usually not "woke") background, though some do not. That does not mean they are still progressives.

I don't know how bright your average Kenyan cabby is; unlike some HBD believers, I find IQ measurements in the Third World to be extremely suspect. But while you may find it admirable that they "hustle" constantly, that doesn't make them highly intelligent. Again, perhaps they are. There are similar types in the US -- some of them fitting the stereotype of the late '80s Jamaican immigrant who has three jobs and is always looking for more work, and others always looking for a new con/scam. The former may be admirable for their work ethic but it says nothing about their intelligence. The latter aren't admirable and most often tend to prey on those of a similar class; they're not lazy but that doesn't mean they're intelligent, just a little brighter (or just less trusting) than whoever they scam. And certainly your average Kenyan cabby has better real-time problem solving ability in his domain than your average Motte poster does. But the reverse is almost certainly true as well.

The reason your professors graded on a curve was that your professors were lazy and stupid.

Some of them were, some of them were not. There are good reasons for not grading on a fixed scale other than laziness, the main one being that if you change your test questions, it's possible you erred about its difficulty. Professors don't have the luxury of trying their questions in advance on calibrated students and seeing how hard they are.

Curves also help fight grade inflation. Yes, your exam was good but it was only the 10th best exam so I can’t give you an A no matter how much you protest.

I found in law school the nature of the curve encouraged me to study harder as it was zero sum and the stakes were high. I acknowledge it can also cause students to study less (probably depending on staked and personality type).

Professors don't have the luxury of trying their questions in advance on calibrated students and seeing how hard they are.

I had one particularly likeable professor that did grade on a curve, but also threw out questions that seemed to get outlier quantities of incorrect responses on the basis that even though the question seemed clear to him, the number of bright people getting it wrong demonstrated that he had either failed to teach it correctly or had asked it poorly. His approach certainly wasn't some red in tooth and claw vision of pitting students against each other, it was genuinely trying to get kids to work hard to understand the material.

This happened to me literally once, in an advanced engineering statistics course. The class average was like 16/100 and the professor decided he would rescind the exam. Except for 3 of us. We had curiously scored in the low 90s. He just told us we'd be getting 105/100 for the exam and could go home for the week.

After all "Why go through the trouble of designing your test so that only X% of students can answer 90% of the questions when you can just hand out the test as is and set the threshold for an A at the Xth percentile of correct responses?". At the end of the day it is much easier to get students to compete amongst themselves than it is to accurately grade their understanding/uptake of the material.

I had a professor that was ecstatic when I told him I barely finished his test on time, as it was his specific goal to write tests that were just hard enough to be barely beatable by the best student in each class. This both prevented cheating and allowed him to confidently grade everyone on a curve. Alas, he was the only one that want to the trouble of doing that.

In any case, being fresh out of high-school and just starting to realize that the vision that I had been harboring of my future was not going to come to pass, these films left me feeling "seen" in a way that I hadn't since I was a small child.

That's fascinating, because I saw the movie and then sought out the book, and both seemed very male to me, the movie in particularly - a young man's vision of the world, when he's drifted into adulthood and so cannot rely on his parents shielding him from the world any longer, but without roots or attachments (like marriage and family) to anchor him.

So it really is - to me - a young guy going "wow, real truths!" but give him another ten to fifteen years of life and he'll grow out of it.

EDIT: That scene is also pointless damage. Yes, learn to face pain and endure, but that scene ends up with a suppurating wound which will need to be treated or else he will suffer more damage and may even lose the use of the hand. Ridiculous vaunting for the sake of it, not for achieving anything.

Probably the single most manipulative person I know has a documented mental disability (low IQ) in addition to her autism (which I share, which is how we met). She tried to manipulate my emotions to get me to be on her assisted decision team, which I know she will hector until they bow to her wishes and let her go to Disney World for a week instead of fixing her roof with the savings.

She has had her rights thoroughly and fully explained to her throughout her public schooling in Special Education. She insists upon them at every turn when someone says something she doesn’t like. She uses threats of suicide to summon the police Crisis Intervention Team to try to get her caretakers at group homes and even her mother to give her what she wants.

But her deficit is real. Attempts to explain, by people she genuinely trusts, go over her head and you can practically hear them whizzing by. Try to stuff into her head a concept not directly concrete or tied to her health and wellness, and you will find nothing but misery and confusion.

She has been convinced, in those terms, that literally every Republican wants to take away her Social Security and let her starve, and she was genuinely suicidal during Trump’s Presidency, and grateful that someone let her vote. No concept of the deep philosophical reasoning behind the right to vote, just a bunch of motivated reasoning.

I find myself remembering that IQ 100 is an average, and realizing how many more Americans like her I’ve never met because I never go where they are; my ingroup is clever talkers, and she is adjacently a clever-talker by the quirks of autism.

Thank you for taking the time and effort to write these posts. As I understand it, your argument is more or less as follows:

  • There is a large inferential distance between yourself, as a former soldier and a representative of the Red tribe, and most of us on this forum, who went to university young and are mostly some form of international knowledge worker.

  • This is not something we can see ourselves. The equipment being used to do the looking gets in the way of the looking. As with the matrix, only a situation that forcibly relocates our worldview will allow us to see what you're getting at.

  • This inference gap, to the extent that we're capable of seeing it, is basically that we ultimately see things in a systemising, academic way. We are armchair professors who sit down and discuss abstract ideas like race, class, representation. We believe in the existence and importance of Society with a big S. We spend most of our lives in urban environments where social convention and rules are more relevant than fundamental natural laws.

  • Because we discuss in those terms, we're incapable of stepping back and seeing that this is all just people. By discussing the culture war, we inevitably find ourselves seeing the world on the culture war's terms. You aren't sitting in traffic, you are traffic.

  • Therefore it is acceptable to describe the average Mottizen as a progressive, even if we vehemently reject that classification, because ultimately it's true. From the perspective of one who can stand outside, we are part of a modern movement which uses a lens that is fundamentally incompatible with what we say we would like to conserve.

@HlynkaCG This is a bit short and muddled, but how close is it? I have thoughts but will put them in a different comment.

There is a large inferential distance between yourself and most of us… This is not something we can see ourselves. The equipment being used to do the looking gets in the way of the looking.

The irony here is that this (and I do think what you’ve written here is an accurate summary of Hlynka’s position) is a very postmodern view of knowledge and discourse. It’s something that Foucault or Derrida easily could have written themselves.

Well, yes. One of the things that I would really like Hylnka to write about is what this inferential distance means for his understanding of the average Mottizen’s position.

EDIT: I think there’s something to it, though. I write a bit about it below but in the last few years my understanding of the world had several big shifts. There’s an impossible-to-describe difference between intellectually analysing position that position and feeling in your bones that it’s true. I have a friend who is a pretty serious conspiracy theorist and on occasion I can just about get close enough to feel his viewpoint from the inside. It’s vertiginous, a cascading loss of trust that produces a completely different understanding of the world. Discussing it from the outside is much easier and more comfortable.

(Continued from the above)

I have some innate sympathy with this position, because I have personally known very intelligent people who had blindspots you could drive a bus through and they couldn't see it however gently you led them.

I used to think somewhat similarly to you (perhaps, inferential distance and all that). I was a Cameron Conservative in the UK (kind of like a Reaganite conservative in the US). I really believed in colourblindness, and treating everyone as an individual, and in equality of opportunity. I scoffed at left-wing abstractions like the Establishment, manufactured consent, class conflict. Most of my extended family were army officers.

And then the wind changed.

Without any particular intention to do so, I got caught up in a proto-Culture War conflicts in 2015/2016. I won't bore you with the details, but I learned very quickly that what was said did not matter. There was no meaningful possibility of persuasion. The way you won conflicts was by controlling the people who were in the room to vote. The usual mechanisms for that were to get the committee secretary to slip in lots of boring business before the meaty stuff, so that anyone who didn't care enough to listen through hours of bullshit and miss supper left, and by making life miserable enough for the people who stayed that they didn't come back. I also learned that it's impossible for a man to win a public argument with a crying woman.

The Brexit vote happened maybe a year later. The pattern was stark. Mostly the university staff (cooks, cleaners, etc. were in favour). Every single academic and student was against. Every. Single. One. Even outside academia, again and again I would find myself the only one in the room. At best people would be interested, at worst they would say vile things without even considering the possibility that someone like me could exist. (Those who expressed doubts about mass vaccination during Covid will recognise the feeling). The Establishment did exist, and I'd just fallen out of it.

By your taxonomy, maybe this makes me a failed progressive, I'm not sure. But what I feel like is a failed Conservative. I tried to be an individualist and I found that in this place and at this time, individualism is wrong. There really do exist mass movements of people that you describe with an abstraction like "whites" or "blacks" or "the Establishment". In a world ruled by identarian leftists, which one of those groups you get pattern-matched to, and the relative status of that group, really does matter - it changes what you can do, what you can say, and the consequences for doing so.*

The live-and-let-live rugged individualism that I think you would like us to follow is not adaptive. A predator has appeared that exploits its weaknesses with great efficiency. The Kendi card beats the MLK card at trumps. You can sit there in splendid isolation as you lose your money, happy that you stayed true to yourself, or you can find a different card.

I don't know what that card looks like. Accusations of anti-semitism were very powerful against Corbyn, groomer discourse seems to get somewhere. To be honest, I think it's too late for the UK - we've imported too many immigrants and we have too few children. We are going to be cursed with a permanent disaffected ethnic minority and the resultant identity politics from now on and I can't see anything we can do about it in the time left. So it goes, I guess.

But if you are sure that the most important thing for conservatives is that they hold fast and don't get seduced by the poison of identity politics, please consider it possible that you might be wrong.

*I have a strong feeling that you are going to say, "Nope, you can say and do whatever you like. That's your decision, and the consequences will be whatever they are." Bugger that. There was a time I didn't have to self-immolate to have a sensible conversation and I want that time back, please. And call me a coward, but if I'm going to kamikaze I want a reasonable estimated return on investment.

The live-and-let-live rugged individualism that I think you would like us to follow is not adaptive.

Say rather, it will not maximize material outcomes when you are the only one doing it.

On the other hand, nothing good will ever happen unless a critical mass of people do it.

Further, no critical mass is possible if everyone else is waiting for others to do it first.

Finally, there are things more important than maximized material outcomes.

The game-theoretic logic you are describing is doomed. People adopting this logic is why everything is going to shit. It cannot make things better, only worse. Self-immolation is not necessary, yet, but what will keep it at bay is for people to live by worthwhile axioms, rather than sinking to the level of their environment. That doesn't mean walking into the office and laying down truth-bombs until you're dragged bodily from the premises. It does mean figuring out what your principles are, and living by them, regardless of the outcome.

There is a problem with your claim. Game-theory was once the best argument in favor of individualism. Game theory predicted that communism would fail because of the incentives. If people had been ready to ignore their own interests for the greater good, then individualism would have had a harder time. And how do you justify the sacrifices for individualism, if you are individualistic? It seems to me it makes no sense.

I think it touches the core of the problem, the heart of the internal contradiction of the american patriotism (or any kind of disinterested attachment to individualism). On one side, there is the individualism that you have learnt to love, and on the other side the attachment that you feel for it; you feel it so strongly that you are ready to sacrifice yourself for it. The problem is that both are contradictory.

Game theory is individualistic (it assumes everyone follows his own interests), yet it predicts that individualism will sometime be sub-optimal. It's like saying that saving America requires more state intervention, but more state intervention will destroy what America stands for. If what I just said is true, then America (or the world individualist party if you prefer) is doomed.

Fair enough. Serious question: What is your plan for obtaining a critical mass?

From where I am standing, you and I are the possessor of exactly one human body each. Those bodies exist in the vicinity of many, many other bodies and so, whether either of us like it or not, they must contend with game theory.

The power of tyranny comes from fear. Fear is generated and maintained by observing punishment. Every time someone stands up for their principles without a plan to survive doing so (or at least to extract net benefit), I believe they are making of themselves a sacrifice to feed what they hate. So the outcome matters. Whether your beliefs work in situ matters. I’m not arguing for nihilistic pursuit of gain, but I am arguing for pragmatism, and sacrificing your lower-level principles when they’re sabotaging your ultimate ones.

From where I am standing, you and I are the possessor of exactly one human body each.

I have a family, so that's a couple-dozen people right there. I have a church, which is upwards of a thousand more. I have a state and, at least nominally, a political party, and finally a tribe. All of these can be encouraged, strengthened, grown, built-up, in ways small and large. The best way to avoid the problems of atomic individualism is to not be an atomic individualist.

The power of tyranny comes from fear.

Fear is a choice. It works by threatening things, and leveraging your desire to preserve them. The truth, however, is nothing can in fact be preserved. Death comes to all men soon or late. Everything you have will one day soon be gone, and this realization can be internalized, to a lesser or greater extent. Doing so immunizes you against fear to the degree the internalization is successful.

I am all for being intelligent, understanding the reality of the situation, and having a plan. What I have found, personally, is that your plan needs to account for the very real possibility that you will suffer significant losses, and you need to make peace with that reality in advance. Here is an example of what that peace looks like, from a time when people were trying to deal with a novel emergent threat of apparently titanic proportions. If one cannot grasp this peace, fear will never cease to cast the deciding vote.

This is not, I think, something that Rationalism is good at, speaking at least from my own meager attempts to apply it. Rationalism is about winning, about optimization, about superior planning leading to everything working out after all. This is one of the major reasons why I don't think Rationalism is actually a workable approach to cognition; it doesn't seem to encourage the sort of gambles that life requires, and its obsession with calculation self-defeats due to unaccounted errors.

In any case, some values are subordinate to others, true enough. But terminal values are not created equal, and "survival" is a very poor and quite doomed one. "Success" is not much better. "Defiance" is better than either, and "Virtue" better still.

This is one of the major reasons why I don't think Rationalism is actually a workable approach to cognition; it doesn't seem to encourage the sort of gambles that life requires

After the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, people were criticizing rationalism/EA for the exact opposite reason, i.e., that it encouraged him to take a gamble and risk major losses just because the expected value was positive, and that without rationalism/EA he would have been more risk-averse.

Stupid, illegal bets with other peoples' money != doing the right thing even if the evidence indicates it's going to cost you dearly. The arguments I saw about SBF's gambles rather underscored the point: I recall people claiming that the fraud made sense by EA principles, because even though he and his business got burned, he donated a lot of money first (apologies if this is misrepresenting the arguments, but it's my basic recollection). This is very, very far from anything I would recognize as "doing the right thing because it's right, even at significant cost, even with no reasonable expectation of a payoff." For starters, it's the difference between accepting hardship and inflicting hardship on others. I can see how hardcore utilitarians might disagree, but that's one of the reasons I'm not a utilitarian.

I have a family, so that's a couple-dozen people right there. I have a church, which is upwards of a thousand more. I have a state and, at least nominally, a political party, and finally a tribe. All of these can be encouraged, strengthened, grown, built-up, in ways small and large. The best way to avoid the problems of atomic individualism is to not be an atomic individualist.

Will any of these groups stand with you if you go against larger society? I've found not only will they not, but the opposite is true. Family is not support but control and hostages; if your family cannot directly coerce you, you will be coerced into going along by implicit or explicit threats of harm to them if they continue (e.g. if you lose your job how will you support them?). Other organizations will warn you not to make trouble because it reflects on them, and expel you if you continue regardless. They may claim to support your position but in fact they will tell you it's not worth it to fight any particular battle. And of course they're right, because the juggernaut state can crush them as easily as it can crush you.

You can 'solve' the problem of atomic individualism by not being an atomic individualist. But that just replaces it with the problem of being a collectivist, which is that nobody gets a say except the head of an independently-powerful faction.

Will any of these groups stand with you if you go against larger society?

Yes, they will.

e.g. if you lose your job how will you support them?

I'll get a different job. In the meantime, my parents and siblings, and my wife's, and members of our church will be happy to house us.

Other organizations will warn you not to make trouble because it reflects on them, and expel you if you continue regardless.

Some organizations will do that, definately. Not my church, I don't think, at least not for reasons I wouldn't consider valid before the fact, and hence would not engage in.

They may claim to support your position but in fact they will tell you it's not worth it to fight any particular battle. And of course they're right, because the juggernaut state can crush them as easily as it can crush you.

The crushing seems to be slowing of late, and much remains un-crushed. In any case: "If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up." And also: "The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one".

What victory are you, personally, willing to accept other than one that comes at no cost to your comfort? If there's a fight and my side wins but we're stuck living with the damage long-term, I can live with that. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that you are not, because long-term diminished standards of living re just another form of loss to you. Am I mistaken?

Then you get a lot more support than I have ever seen. Perhaps you are simply higher status; in any organization I have been in, the organization's needs (meaning those of the people running it) come first, second, and last.

What victory are you, personally, willing to accept other than one that comes at no cost to your comfort?

I no longer believe in victory.

If there's a fight and my side wins but we're stuck living with the damage long-term, I can live with that. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that you are not, because long-term diminished standards of living re just another form of loss to you. Am I mistaken?

I could live with that as well, but your side seems mostly unwilling to fight and if they did would likely be unable to win. Those on your side in power hold to principles the other side cynically turns against them, even to the point where they enforce those principles against their own side but not the other (e.g. see the recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act). The rest retreat believing that perhaps THIS TIME, they will not be chased... and if they are, well, there's always victory after death, as both you and Hlynka have claimed. I'm not religious and not a born Red Tribe person; I have nowhere to retreat to and I do not believe in anything after death.

I think we are going to have to suffer. As long as you require a reasonable return on your investment you will remain hostage to the powers that be.

It sometimes feels like the biggest inferential distance for me is between the typical motte poster you describe and myself, despite the hugely similar surface level appearances.

I'm on OG motter, I came over as a moderator from the culture war thread on slatestarcodex. You know this, because (for those who don't know) you were there with me.

I'm a systematizer, I liked reading some of Elizer's fictional works, Bryan Caplan has long been an intellectual north star for me, I often dislike getting my hands dirty, I doubt I would have made it through a week of boot camp, and I'd certainly be lost and hopeless in a foreign country etc etc.

Still, I read your posts and I never think "that is me he is talking about". It is like describing to a fish that a fish is creature that swims in water. The fish looks around and sees other fish and thinks "oh those things".

Anyways weird personal feelings aside, or maybe because of them, I feel like I've already grokked these insights you have to bring.

Humans are adaptive. And when we live in a world of systemetizers we shall get good at systemetizing. When we live in a world of multilingualism, multi-businesses, and multi-cons we shall get good at that too.

To a large extent I think the world of academics and systemitizing has not arisen out of anyone or anything's desire for control, but as a natural competitive process among humans. Our big useless brains are peacock feathers. Adaptiveness is hot and sexy, and to be so adaptive that you can waste a bunch of resources on something that is not adaptive is even hotter! The original academics were all bored out of their minds landed aristocrats. Pick almost any philosopher / thinker / scientist from the 17/18/19th century and they were nearly all independently wealthy. Those aristocrats had won the game of life so badly that they had to invent a new game just to keep playing.

The enlightenment was a great accident. A result of man's competitive nature hitting a wall. A wall that meant that the best of them had all sort of won. Or at least couldn't figure out how to clearly win any harder than they already had. The new game they created was enlightenment about the physical world. Eventually they seemed to tire of that game as well, and they went back to killing each other to prove who was best. We ended up with the absolute tragedy of the world wars, and a century of the elites trying to strut their dicks around like fucking cavemen. A tragedy, but a predictable, and expected one.

I think of all the competition in the modern world as a game. Its not really for survival, unless someone chooses to make it about survival (which they often do). And I fully get that I am playing a game, and that it is very different than the struggle that is survival.

It is fathers day. My father has always epitomized a yearning to have that struggle for survival. He joined the army just as the vietnam war was ending. He was disappointed that he wouldn't get to go over and kill the [ethnic slurs]. He loved camping, hiking, cross country running, collecting knives, hunting small game, carpentry, and construction. I use past tense because he is old and does fewer of these things nowadays, and has mellowed out with the copious amounts of marijuana he consumes.

He was always terrible at playing "the game". He always managed to be on the wrong side of office politics anytime there was cleansing. There was always a bitterness he carried through life as he never seemed to understand why he kept losing at the soft things in life.

In contrast, my mother plays politics like a champ. Well enough that I can't always tell if she knows what she is doing, or has just been doing it so long it is second nature. She was nearly in the c-suite at a company that had billions in revenue a year before she retired.

So I get it when guys watch fight club and the matrix get that feeling that the world is fucked up. We are animals damnit! Our instincts and our bodies are not meant for these soft games of politics! We are meant to fight for survival, to truly struggle, and to be beaten by the world not by our fellow people! I get it. I feel the same way.

But I grew up watching my dad yearn for that world that doesn't exist, and I think it broke him hard enough to make me and my brother come out pre-broken. I'm not gonna live wishing for a world that doesn't exist. I've got the world as it is, and I don't plan to be a sucker that loses to the soft men and women of the world. And by being unwilling to lose to them, I have become a soft man myself.

Long rambling to say, we won too hard at the struggle of survival. Now everything is just games of competition, and losing isn't fun.

When you say 'I'm anti-woke' when you talk about wokeness, you're saying 'I'm anti-Black.’”

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

More generally, I think reactionaries are too obsessed with black people. Black people are unlikely to make up more than 15% of the American population any time soon. AA birth rates have converged with the white rate. In South Africa, black people are the great majority of the population. In America, they likely never will be. Black people have been in the US longer than many Europeans, and have nothing much to do with the large scale demographic change that has occurred since the 1970s. Ultimately, any pro-black affirmative action, state support etc will always have to be passed with the assistance of the majority of the rest of the population, whether that is white or latino or a mix of both. Issues with race relations that exist between black and white Americans are largely separate to mass immigration, and would exist in the same way even if America had remained 85% white.

When you say 'I'm anti-woke' when you talk about wokeness, you're saying 'I'm anti-Black.’”

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

Because it’s not the same rhetorical game. In my experience the ‘anti-woke’ people are vocally and actively anti-affirmative action, blackwashing, pride stuff, etc and ‘diversity’ people in my general experience tend to express that it’s never meant to be anti-white, even when it is (except that’s a good thing).

I think the code thing is true in both cases more or less. If you’re anti-woke you oppose the DEI and “anti-racism” agenda and so on (anti-racism in quotes because this isn’t the same as beliefs in equality, but a suite of social and political views that are called anti-racism).

And in most instances, anti-racism is, in practical terms anti-white. When companies brag about their diversity, it’s generally that they e made a special effort to find, recruit and promote non-whites. When schools talk about reading more diverse sources, generally it means setting aside classic European texts to add in texts from Africa, Asia, and Latin America where the population isn’t white.

I agree to an extent. Conflating demographic replacement with blacks was always an implicit lefty meme born out of their inability to distinguish ingroup/outgroup bias from narratives surrounding immigration and birthrates. The concern over blacks in the US is not demographic but 'cultural' for a lack of a better term.

When 6% of the population is committing 50-60% of all violent crime you should be allowed to ask why they are all black men and what can be done about them as black men before you start restructuring your potentially high trust white society to account for such a disruptive minority. In that sense blacks act as a disruption generator that fuels the aspects reactionaries hate the most about modern lib/left/progressive expression. Primarily the aspect that they are traitors who refuse to face the hard truths and instead let others carry the cost of the fantasies their unexamined privilege affords them.

To that end black emancipation was never achieved off the back of a popular majority. It was always the elites pushing the envelope and imposing their delusions on the lower classes. The old generation with their old propaganda gets cycled out and the new generation with new propaganda gets cycled in to continue where the old left off.

On the other hand, modern US society is in part based on worshipping black people. I mean, can anyone deny to ridiculous effort both sides of the mainstream enact in just to get a black person to mouth off their talking points? And the fact people genuinely feel that their side is more valid if they have a black person on their side.

I wish I could find the study that, in broad terms, showed how depicting blacks as fighting for a just cause made people more likely to assume blacks in general were more virtuous. It, at the very least, confirmed all of my biases regarding the effects I felt after being exposed to a nigh endless propaganda stream of blacks protesting during the civil rights era against the evil white supremacist empire. I mean, why were the evil white police hitting the innocent blacks who just wanted to be treated the same? My 12 year old brain could make no sense of it, and came to the obvious logical conclusion that one side was good and the other evil.

That's not the entire truth though. The backdrop to the peaceful protests was violent riots and full scale political terrorism, as is examined in detail in Days of Rage In full context, the civil rights movement is not just a bunch of innocent blacks getting beaten up by sadist white men. But that would only exist as a sideshow to the baseline that black people, in general, are not more virtuous than others, despite many people intrinsically believing so.

As for black men and crime, as long as the societal norm is to apply blame and dish out punishment based on historical crimes made by your ancestors, like is done to white people, on top of blaming them as a group for any activity a white person undertakes as an individual, which is done on top of actively marginalizing against white men based on the comparatively poor performance of blacks, as well as actively fostering an environment that excuses black crime and vilifies white crime, and all of those activities existing under an umbrella of anti-racism, I see no reason why we can't have an active anti-racist marginalization campaign enacted against black men.

Nothing should be done about "black men", but something can be done about criminals. Those are two separate categories.

I very much agree with this but would like to make sure we're on the same page on drilling down to the individual in our pursuits of equal treatment. We should address only the criminals no matter their skincolor. But we should also be distributing aid and help also only based on need correct? No blanket affirmative action pushes so that the poor white trailer kid gets the same help as the poor black resident in a blighted neighborhood?

To that end black emancipation was never achieved off the back of a popular majority. It was always the elites pushing the envelope and imposing their delusions on the lower classes

Is this really in reference to slavery? If so, black emancipation won a fairly resounding seal of approval in 1864 and 1868.

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

One is true and the other is false.

"Diversity is code for anti-white" is based on the logic that since efforts to diversify organizations/companies/government/etc. typically involve reducing the relative proportion of whites and increasing the proportion of non-whites, diversity is anti-white.

"Anti-woke is code for anti-black" is based on the logic that since 'anti-woke' efforts include as a central pillar the elimination of affirmative action (in education, employment, federal contracting and so on), thereby certainly reducing the relative proportion of black people in those organizations, anti-woke is anti-black.

You can take a principled libertarian stance that 'diversity' is manipulating the ratios and 'anti-woke' merely restoring the natural order of things, but from a consequentialist perspective one linearly reduces the proportion of whites in major organizations and one linearly reduces the proportion of blacks. A white person advocating the latter and a black person the former are both displaying ethnic self-interest.

"Diversity" is aimed (often explicitly) at reducing the relative proportion of whites (and sometimes Asians). Elimination of affirmative action is aimed at NOT doing that. These are not the same.

You can’t tell me that anti-affirmative action advocates aren’t firmly aware that they’re in practice advocating for a huge reduction in black representation in top colleges, businesses, civil service employment, state contracts and so on.

I am saying that removal of discrimination is not the same as implementing it, even if some of the effects are.

Can a disabled person argue that eliminating disability welfare is anti-disabled people?

Are you prepared to argue that being black is a disability akin to being blind? Should you argue we should allocate some NIH funds to look for the cure?

That's not comparable at all. The point of disability welfare is to provide them with the baseline of a life worth living, which we want to provide to everyone. Few proponents of meritocracy propose letting the useless languish.

AA, however, goes way beyond that. It gives blacks an advantage beyond that. It's fair to say everyone should live a dignified life. It's not fair some people to say some people should get unmerited success beyond what others get, based on their skin color.

I wouldn't say being a against a blindness quota for pilots is anti blind people.

They can argue anything they want, but I see no reason to accept their framing. "You're arguing against an advantage for me, therefore you are anti-me" isn't valid.

Aware - maybe, want - not at all. Reducing the representation is not the policy goal. Stopping artificial racist distortion of the market (and society) is. If the statistics would be different - then it will be, but it's not the goal of the advocacy. Just as the result of reducing child mortality could be raise in crime (because poor children would die more often, and if they stop dying, they have higher chance to grow up into criminals), it does not mean every pediatrician has increasing crime as their goal. Making such inferences is both unproductive and unfair.

2rafa is arguing consequentialism here, that anti-AA advocates are firmly aware of the consequences of their actions. This is indeed the bar because the context is that Diversity is anti-white in consequences.

If pro-AA advocates can play the intent and goal card, then the policy goal of Diversity is to stop artificial racist distortion of the market, which is what results in underperforming minorities.

Are both of these inferences unfair, or only one?

"Diversity" is anti-white in intent, in action, and in consequences. As we routinely have confirmed with advocates of such using phrases like "stale, pale, and male" or "useless white male pilots".

then the policy goal of Diversity is to stop artificial racist distortion of the market, which is what results in underperforming minorities.

That assumes such a distortion exists, which is very much unproven. While the AA distortion is obvious and easily seen - and, in fact, nobody even attempts to hide it, and if they did, it'd be extremely easy to disprove just quoting their own policies - the other side requires introducing phlogiston-like "systemic racism", which is immeasurable, imperceptible, unfalsifiable and can only be proven by employing the circular argument from the outcome. Admittedly, some racist policies existed, and it is theoretically possible somehow, somewhere the remnants of them survived (e.g., gun control policies or union protections have well known racist roots) - and if they did, getting rid of them would be appropriate. However, that is not what AA proponents are arguing for, and that's not what they are basing their argument on. There's no symmetry - it's like comparing General Relativity and flat-earth hypothesis - on the surface, both look structurally similar, as they both make some claims about certain phenomena, but once you bother looking deeper, the similarity disappears entirely.

"Anti-woke" includes many things that are beneficial to black people, most obviously in that it opposes wokeness in areas that have nothing to do with race, but also even within the realm of race. For instance, consider the CDC's COVID-19 vaccine prioritization policy. They deprioritized older people relative to essential workers because older people are more white, even though they estimated this would result in many additional deaths (especially if the vaccine was less effective at preventing infection than serious disease, which turned out to be the case). This policy killed more black people it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. How did it benefit black people that more of them died so that more white people would die so that the percentages looked better to woke ACIP/CDC officials? Take the argument from the expert on ethics and health-policy the NYT quoted:

“Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

I don't think the average black person would really be sympathetic to this argument, even before you pointed out it was also going to kill more black people. These sorts of arguments are mostly only appealing to the woke. And of course the same is true for plenty of less life-or-death issues, like Gamergate's NotYourShield consisting of women and minorities who didn't think they benefited from journalists defending themselves by accusing critics of being sexist/racist/etc.

Furthermore, even within the limited realm of affirmative-action I don't think wokeness genuinely serves the racial self-interest of black people. There are many more black people who benefit from infrastructure than from racial quotas in infrastructure contracts, more who need medical care than who go to medical school, more who use Google than who work for Google. It isn't just the principles that want the black percentage to be high vs. the ones that want it to be low, there is an inherent asymmetry because meritocracy isn't just an arbitrary "principled libertarian stance", it serves an important functional purpose.

Of course diversity advocates also sometimes say that affirmative-action/etc. benefits everyone, it's just that they're wrong. Other times racial resentment and malice clearly play a role, but even then that doesn't mean it actually serves racial self-interest. In general I think ideological conflicts have a lot more true believers and a lot less people cynically pursuing their interests than people tend to think they have.

One is hinged, one is unhinged.

@The_Nybbler was certainly playing a bit loose with the boundary of "low effort", there, and I definitely directed a frown in that direction, but all you did was add heat to it. Please don't do that.

The left has a clear idea of what it means to be "woke." They believe that since American life is built on a white supremacist foundation, equality demands race-based redistribution policies. These include mandatory racial quotas in hiring, DEI indoctrination in schools and businesses, and criminal justice reforms designed to benefit POC. Race is central to how the left understands "wokeness." Everything else follows.

I actually don't think that's the case. Sure, that's the message...but in reality, note that anything that actually negatively affects them and their circles are omitted from this. I would actually argue that this "Woke"...this modern Pop Progressivism is more defined by what it isn't rather than what it is, what it excludes rather than what it includes. That is, protecting and enhancing the role of class and status privilege in our society. The focus on certain identity characteristics...first it was sex, then it was race, and now we're on gender in terms of a strict oppressor-oppressed dichotomy serves that purpose.

Because not freezing out those facets, frankly, things look awfully different. It looks a lot more like the dismantling of the managerial class, both private and public in favor of lower-class workers, giving the latter more status, power, and most importantly, money and wealth. We don't see quotas in hiring, we see pressure to increase the churn among established workers along with a post-bias process for new hiring. We see largely a dropping of those DEI departments, to be frank, to increase funding for front-line positions in terms of additional wages and manpower (so their jobs are less difficult). The criminal justice thing? You know, that would probably look like both a more responsive and a more responsible police policy. Basically what liberals (I.E. the south of center range of people flowing from materialist Marxists to Classical Liberals.) have been calling for.

I think it's a mistake to actually take these ideas at face value.

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Also giving executives who fail miserably huge severance packages instead of doing what they should, telling them to get on the dole like a normal person.

They get severance that you don't for the same reason that they get paid more than you. So I'd say that yes, they should get huge severance packages.

Contra Cori Bush, the War on Woke is not a proxy for race issues. In fact, it appears to be diverting the Right from those problems. That’s a grave mistake. Mass immigration and anti-white racism are far more important than who Bud Light puts on a beer can.

anti-wokeism is rebranded '80s, '90s and early 2000s era culture wars. Race, ethnicity are supposed to be irrelevant or secondary.

On the same day as Cori Bush’s unhinged rant, conservatives cheered on Muslims protesting LGBT curricula in Montgomery County, Maryland schools. They championed Armenians beating up Antifa at a protest against school Pride Month activities in Glendale, California. These immigrant communities were heralded as the new bastion against progressivism, a POC revolt against white liberal extremism.

The enemy of my enemy is my enemies enemy, no more --- but also no less.

You seem to be playing some sort of game here, and I strongly suspect you are trolling.

You have posted several times like this, long form culture war articles which you don't explicitly agree with, even suggest you might disagree, but this appears to be merely a guise for introducing the article without committing yourself to actually endorsing it. "Look at this article by a white nationalist; isn't this interesting?"

Normally, while I might consider this a little sketchy, you aren't the only regular poster who makes a habit of being somewhat oblique about your agenda, and we don't exactly have a rule requiring you to be explicit about your POV and agenda. (The requirement to speak plainly comes close, but people often misinterpret this as "You must always be direct and explicit and literal about what you're saying," and that's not really what it means.)

You've been warned a couple of times by @naraburns, and your now-deleted responses are consistent with this pattern of being coy about your intentions. @naraburns has also observed your tendency to write trollish posts that seems calculated to provoke responses without really saying anything.

Following your last posting spree, you deleted all your previous posts. While we allow people to delete their posts (though we'd prefer they didn't), this also looks quite suspect.

All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).

You have posted several times like this, long form culture war articles which you don't explicitly agree with, even suggest you might disagree, but this appears to be merely a guise for introducing the article without committing yourself to actually endorsing it. "Look at this article by a white nationalist; isn't this interesting?"

But he made a similar post of an article by a far-left person (the article by ganz). All told I'd rather have his posts than not.

Also ... while for each individual post I'd prefer some commentary than no commentary, the requirement to add commentary instead of just excerpts significantly decreases the number of posts, and if the rule would lead to e.g. the ganz post not being posted because the author has no commentary I'm not sure it's a good rule.

Would it be possible to make the policy against deletion harsher? I get if people want to be done with the site, and want to delete things to do what they can to remove their traces from the internet, but just run of the mill removing comments in the midst of a conversation, especially top-level ones, while continuing to post new ones, is something that I think is fairly harmful. (also not a huge fan of private mode, but whatever—in any case, being in private mode makes deleting top-level comments even less defensible)

It's a shame, because they'd be welcome as a progressive poster interested in what conservatives think. And I genuinely do think a lot of the articles this user has posted have prompted interesting discussion. But deleting posts after a few hours on such a regular basis is poor form (at least wait until the end of the week).

There is no way this guy’s a progressive. What is he, writing a PhD on the identification of different flavours of stochastic terrorism? We get few progressives as it is, and it just so happens this one is more interested in far right content than we are.

Greer is interesting in that he presents himself as a race conscious conservative, putting him well outside the mainstream, but he never "calls out "Jewish power", which has alienated him among other far right online commentators.

Just add quotes around ‘jewish power’, and no one will notice the odd insider narration. Actually I'm pretty sure I read the above sentence, possibly about another guy, from another disposable account. To JQ or not to JQ, that is their question.

Inb4 OP deletes.

He has argued against resident reactionaries before (example today). Could it be a next-level psy op? I guess it could. My guess is he's a rationalist-verse poster though, not a Sneerclub regular. I could be wrong.

FWIW he doesn't strike me as a DR person trying to under-cover drop redpills or anything. i.e. he said:

People familiar with the online right know that there's a rift between those who prioritize hating black people and those who prioritize hating Jews.

It's either a talented troll, or he's sincere and should just lurk more until he has a better understanding for posting standards. I think it's the latter.

It’s weak bait, a few breadcrumbs. From a private, month-old account who never stays for any real discussion. Last time, you said you liked his posts, then he deleted everything, hours after posting. You may find it comfy to have him lobbing the easiest balls in your direction, but he obviously has a record of dishonesty. He’s far right, not sneerclub.

foreverlurker just posted this OP:

In the Culture War thread, SecureSignals cited an article in which Ron Unz quotes a "secret report" from the Polish Ambassador to the U.S. In the report, the Ambassador supposedly wrote that, basically, powerful Jews in the U.S. are responsible for turning public opinion against Germany.

SecureSignals claimed that the authenticity of this document was "confirmed many times over", but provided no evidence of this. My brief search found that the Ambassador, Jerzy Potocki, denied that he wrote the document. Reading the alleged report, it's so nakedly and unoriginally anti-Jewish that it seems like the kind of thing that the Nazis would fabricate, but I'm wondering if anyone has more information on the report or about Potocki more generally.

Of course, even if the document is authentic, Potocki's claim that "propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% [of the] radio, film, daily and periodical press" is nonsensical in light of how much editorial power William Randolph Hearst had in the 30's and 40's.

I don’t know anything about this affair, but the denial by potocki in 1940 seems suspect to me, like I’m sure to most reasonable people. Now do you see the bait? It's encouraging people to find out that potocki really said those things, and then.... profit .... people's minds will be blown by the JQ. And he's like 'Oh my , how can such vile antisemitic claims be uttered by a pole, let alone be true. Wait, let me find more antisemitic claims for you to "debunk". "

He talks exactly like the last alt , from the same faux-mainstream perspective, about the same topics, 99% JQ.

While I'm at it, @SecureSignals , @hanikrummihundursvin , do you honestly think this guy's not on your side?

To be fair, it seems pretty hard to find information about it on the internet. I did a search before making my post and could only find that 1940 Jewish Telegraph Agency article which is probably what he found. That indicates he also did a search, could not find anything to corroborate the authenticity with google searching but found a denial, and then asked if anyone had more information. The only other brief reference to this was this Wikiquote link which contains a quote from the report which is flagged as disputed, with the very same 1940 JTA article as a source.

The only sources I can find confirming the authenticity are the very same cited in the article I linked, so he probably did not find anything to corroborate the authenticity from a google search.

In conclusion, a Google search yields essentially nothing about these documents except the 1940 JTA article. So him concluding "this is probably fake but if it's real it doesn't matter" seems genuine to me. It is pretty mind-blowing how closely that memo mirrors German propaganda all the way through alt-right propaganda about "spreading freedom and democracy" in the Middle East as a front for fighting wars on behalf of Israel. It's understandable why someone who denies the JQ would regard this as highly suspect for what is essentially contemporary, independent corroboration from a Polish ambassador to the anti-Semitic rhetoric.

But I'll admit I'm not 100% certain, maybe he's a DR person throwing soft-balls, but he is saying enough things that indicate to me he's not. It's easy to accidentally throw softballs at the DR if you are not experienced actually talking to them.

The only sources I can find confirming the authenticity are the very same cited in the article I linked

Why then did you say earlier its authenticity "has been confirmed many times over"? Are you and the DR in the habit of taking nazi propaganda at face value?

Because the article contains multiple sources with citations? If it didn't contain citations I wouldn't take it at face value:

There is no question that the secret documents taken from the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw are authentic. Charles C. Tansill considered the documents genuine and stated, “Some months ago I had a long conversation with M. Lipsky, the Polish ambassador in Berlin in the prewar years, and he assured me that the documents in the German White Paper are authentic.”[6]

William H. Chamberlain wrote , “I have been privately informed by an extremely reliable source that Potocki, now residing in South America, confirmed the accuracy of the documents, so far as he was concerned.”[7] Historian Harry Elmer Barnes also stated, “Both Professor Tansill and myself have independently established the thorough authenticity of these documents.”[8]

Edward Raczyński, the Polish ambassador to London from 1934 to 1945, confirmed in his diary the authenticity of the Polish documents. He wrote in his entry on June 20, 1940: “The Germans published in April a White Book containing documents from the archives of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, consisting of reports from Potocki from Washington, Łukasiewicz in Paris and myself. I do not know where they found them, since we were told that the archives had been destroyed. The documents are certainly genuine, and the facsimiles show that for the most part the Germans got hold of the originals and not merely copies.”[9]

The official papers and memoirs of Juliusz Łukasiewicz published in 1970 in the book Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939 reconfirmed the authenticity of the Polish documents. Łukasiewicz was the Polish ambassador to Paris, who authored several of the secret Polish documents. The collection was edited by Wacław Jędrzejewicz, a former Polish diplomat and cabinet member. Jędrzejewicz considered the documents made public by the Germans absolutely genuine, and quoted from several of them.

Tyler G. Kent, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, has also confirmed the authenticity of the secret Polish documents. Kent says that he saw copies of U.S. diplomatic messages in the files which corresponded to the Polish documents.[10]

The German Foreign Office published the Polish documents on March 29, 1940. The Reich Ministry of Propaganda released the documents to strengthen the case of the American isolationists and to prove the degree of America’s responsibility for the outbreak of war. In Berlin, journalists from around the world were permitted to examine the original documents themselves, along with a large number of other documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry. The release of the documents caused an international media sensation. American newspapers published lengthy excerpts from the documents and gave the story large front-page headline coverage.[11]

More comments

The Potocki report is suspect not because it's unbelievable that a Polish aristocrat from the 1930s would be anti-semitic (would be surprising if he wasn't), but because it's suspect that a Polish diplomat would author a report that boils down to, "the only reason the Americans and English would want to go to war for Poland is because the Jews are tricking them into it." If Potocki really did deny writing it, and it boils down to "he said she said" then I think it's probably a Nazi fabrication.

Sounds polish enough. What about the evidence unz gives (here's the book), does it seem credible to you?

Well like @Esperanza says, only two or three of those are 'hostile witnesses' whose bias would not be to confirm such documents. Even if some of the documents in the 'White Book' are real, doesn't mean all of them are. In any case, I don't see what the 'bombshell' is supposed to be. It's one man's subjective opinion. In general I think Unz's "American Pravda" articles are bad.

Contra Greer, I like Asian-Americans, find that they are on average excellent American citizens and net contributors, and the extent to which their politics leans Democrat seems heavily driven by continued wignat sentiments. I don't actually think I need to "remember that identity will always remain paramount" to find common cause with Asian-Americans in battles against affirmative action or other racial spoils systems.

'Asian American' is far too broad a category. Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans are about as different to each other as either is to European-Americans. In general on the 'new right' we see (and have long seen, see Dinesh D'Souza in the 1990s) quite a substantial number of South Asians (including even a few Pakistanis and Bengalis here and there), but very, very few East Asian Americans, who are more uniformly progressive.

This doesn't track with personal experience or with any polling I've ever seen. Indian Americans are the Asian American group that is usually most consistently supportive of Democrats (e.g. 2020 and 2012). It's possible that East Asian Americans are just less likely to engage deeply in politics overall, so your observations may just be a variance effect.

Too broad for what, exactly? We surely can drill down even further and note that Hmong-Americans aren't socioeconomically advantaged, or that Korean-Americans do tend towards more conservative affiliations (see Michelle Steel and Young Kim, see also the relationship of Korean immigrants to the LA riots), and I think that makes sense at times. I agree with the obvious statement that South Asians and East Asians aren't very similar. Nonetheless, my statement above seems true for the aggregated group that includes both South Asians and East Asians. Most importantly in the context of the Greer article, I reject the idea of my racial identity being highly salient when it comes to whether I should regard people of both South Asian and East Asian as both good Americans and potential allies across many political dimensions.

My guess is that at least a part of Asian-American Dem identification is also simply driven by the fact that GOP continues to be the party of (mostly Evangelical Protestant) Christianity and, out of the major US demographics, Asian-Americans are least likely to be Christian.

Only when you lump them under the same umbrella. Koreans and Filipinos are Christian to the point of stereotype.

the extent to which their politics leans Democrat seems heavily driven by continued wignat sentiments.

Don't overestimate the impact of a tiny fringe of online shitpoasters. Most Asian-Americans live in heavily-progressive areas; the dominant culture of these areas is progressive, and this has permeated nearly all the institutions around them. Their kids are brought up in classrooms where the basic progressive narratives on ethics and history are taught as gospel and entirely unquestioned. They live under progressive governance. Thus, they learn to play the progressive game - advocating for ethnic spoils as an "oppressed minority" - because that's how to get along as a numerically-small minority in large blue polities.

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What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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