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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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Reddit Blackout Update: The Admins Strike Back.

Entering day 5 of the "48-hour" blackout in protest of the proposed API changes, many subreddits have chosen to stay private indefinitely until their demands are met. Over the last few days the admins have not-so-subtly telegraphed both on Reddit and in the media their intention to end the blackout and remove uncooperative moderators. But how? I have mentioned before Reddit's feudalistic structure which requires unpaid mods to do the dirty work of removing spam and enforcing content rules. If Reddit were to simply force open subs against the wishes of the mod team, the mods could simply revolt and refuse to work.

Well, Spez seems to have found a solution:

How to request an abandoned community or a mod list reorder.

We’ve received hundreds of inquiries regarding what to do if your mod team disagrees on how to reopen your communities. I am sure many of you are aware that mod teams of subreddits that have stayed private are receiving modmails from this account. Our goal with these messages is to restore community stability by establishing moderator consensus on how to move forward. In many cases, we've already helped teams reopen with no action beyond a conversation. In some instances, this might result in a reordering of the moderator list. In rare instances, this will result in mod removals. What this means is:

  • If mods disagree about how to moderate their community, we will reorder the moderator list to grant top slots to mods that want to keep their communities active and engaged. For example, if a top mod wants to stop moderating, but keep the community private indefinitely, they will be bumped down the list so a more active moderator can step in. (rule 4)
  • If a mod or mods are engaging in flagrantly disruptive behavior that compromises the stability of their community, they will be removed. For example, if an inactive top moderator comes back and decides to vandalize the community, they will be removed. (rule 1 & 2)

Both actions are against our Moderator Code Of Conduct.

How to request moderation privileges for an abandoned community or a top mod removal:

We’re experiencing a high volume of requests via our standard Reddit Request and Top Mod Removal Process. To expedite the process, if your mod team has an inactive top mod (or mods) and you would like to request to have that mod moved down the list, please reach out here.

Please include the usernames of inactive mods you wish to have reordered on the mod list, and be sure to inform your fellow mods of this request. When we say “inactive,” we do not mean overall activity on reddit – we mean activity within your subreddit specifically. Once we receive this message, we will reach out to the entire team to ensure we understand your needs and then work with you to rebuild community stability.

We understand this is a turbulent time and want to do our best to support you and your community’s needs.

Feudal problems require feudal solutions. In this case, the king (Spez), is checking the power of the upper nobility (power mods) by playing them off the lower nobility and peasants (small time mods and users). This ensures a smooth transition of power, as the lower mods who will be actioning these requests have moderation experience, familiarity with the communities they will be moderating, and they will be selected specifically for their collaboration with Reddit against other unaligned forces.

In reality, this process makes itself redundant by design. The power mods behind the blackout know they've been outplayed and outgunned. Subreddits that were committed to indefinite blackout as recently as this morning are reopening, much to the embarrassment of the mod team at the hands of the community. Reddit moderators now answer directly to Spez, and they know it.

I feel like Kissinger about the Iran/Irak war. It's a shame they can't both lose.

At least we're getting a nice demonstration of the high-low vs middle mechanism.

I guess moving theMotte off Reddit has proven itself more and more to be a good decision

Why does a bunch of subreddits going private for a few days prove that it was a good decision?

Why does a bunch of subreddits going private for a few days prove that it was a good decision

Personally I question whether I could bring myself to use Reddit (and by extension /r/themotte) if the official interface were the only option. I suspect the axe will fall on https://old.reddit.com next. So you'd be deprived of my company for whatever that's worth.

But yeah, as far as I can tell, censorship was the first, second, third, fourth, and only reason we left. This cringe compilation tier revolution and insta-capitulation by reddit mods is amusing but ultimately irrelevant to us.

If the API crackdown is really about LLM training data (which it probably is), old.reddit is almost guaranteed to be either eliminated completely or cut down to nu-reddit levels of functionality (only showing 3 comments at a time) because it is so easily scrapeable in current form.

I expect this to happen as soon as the hype around the API lockdown dissipates.

It's not about the subreddits going private, it's the thorough demonstration of power that the admins have shown. The admins have always had the ability to remove moderators at will and instate their own loyalists, and they're using it to break up the protest.

TheMotte went off of Reddit for the very same reason that the admins are very willing to wield their power to achieve their own interests.

Last time I asked a similar question and the highly upvoted response was that we no longer have to deal with Reddit doing “questionable things”, which seems like a carte blanche to sneer at Reddit for any reason whatsoever.

One highly upvoted comment in that /r/NFL thread really summed it up for me:

Really gives you some insight into the average reddit mod, that they care more about holding on to their tiny little shred of power than they do about whatever issue they're protesting about.

From my perspective, this is much broader than Reddit mods, and it's as much about how pointless and performative their protest was as it was about the power. This is also why I regard the 2020 BLM riots as a policy choice rather than an unstoppable force of genuine sentiment.

If you don't like reddit, why would you take actions that ultimately give more power to mods that like reddit and less to mods that don't like it? An anti-reddit mod falling on his sword seems like it'd only be better for reddit in the long run.

I don't think the two situations are remotely comparable. Site owners removing accounts from a list of mods is much easier than removing protestors from a physical space.

I disagree. BLM was massively goosed by the media. With little attention given to it, it would have fizzled. I think we overestimate how "organic" these movements are.

I don't see how Reddit mods taking their subs public again once Reddit demonstrates a capacity to replace them is evidence for or against the organic-ness of BLM.

From the decision maker’s point of view the difficulty is the same, just telling someone else to do it. It’s the outcomes that are less certain with physical removal.

Removing protestors is easy, doing it peacefully is harder. But it's not impossible, you can make it look like they struck the first blow, provoke them into doing so or you can make the use of force celebrated.

That may be but it still seems much harder than removing someone from a moderator position on a site you own. Plus there is very different leverage, mods want to stay on the mod list, and protestors just want to cause a vague enough disturbance that their cause gets headlines. Arresting them doesn't prevent protestors from achieving their goal, where mods you have total leverage over. This whole thing is just 'all things I don't like are the same' type thinking.

Feudal problems require feudal solutions. In this case, the king (Spez), is checking the power of the upper nobility (power mods) by playing them off the lower nobility and peasants (small time mods and users). This ensures a smooth transition of power, as the lower mods who will be actioning these requests have moderation experience, familiarity with the communities they will be moderating, and they will be selected specifically for their collaboration with Reddit against other unaligned forces.

In the real world, the house nearly always wins. The scrappy upstarts gets brutally beaten down and possibly destroyed. Hollywood has destroyed so many lives by feeding people false fantasies during their childhoods (often with parents helping to pile on) as people later become confronted with life as it is rather than an idealised version that never existed.

This reddit drama is just a microcosm of that. It's also a gentle reminder that much of our actual lives are essentially hyperauthoritarian with basically zero democracy. A lot of anarchist theorists have noted this in the past when analysing our modern liberal capitalist systems, but it's nice to get another confirmation with this entire saga. Ultimately the only voices that actually matter can be counted on a single hand. That is true in almost all large organisms, ranging from large communities, corporations to even nation-states.

If Reddit's userbase actually for the most part supported the protests then I think Spez would probably have to fold. But I think that the userbase does not. Most Redditors either do not care about the protests or they hate the mods more than they hate Reddit the company. The protesting mods tried to launch a revolution in a community where most people do not support them and so they got crushed. This does not necessarily mean that there is no democracy there, it just means that the people do not want the blackouts.

The new /r/nba and /r/nfl threads about the re-openings are mostly made up of people who are expressing not just disagreement with the mods, but who are actively mocking and deriding the mods. Given what mods are usually like, this is not surprising. Some would argue that the people who support the mods are just not participating in those threads, but I doubt that this is a significant factor. Many of the mods themselves could not stop themselves from participating in Reddit during the blackouts. I doubt that their supporters are much different.

It might have made more sense for the mods to switch to work-to-rule instead of the 48 hour lock out. One of their main objections was that without API access via third party apps their work would be made harder, so show what the effects would be by modding using only the Reddit app. Submissions take longer to get approved, spam slips through, reports go unmodded, trolls go unchecked, duplicate posts proliferate, custom scripts stop posting whatever special features the subs use them for, admins get more tickets from mods asking for support and missing features, and the invisible janitor work begins to become more visible in its absence. If mod work is valuable and the Reddit app makes mod work less effective the result ought to be that Reddit gets worse. What's Reddit going to do, complain that they got what they wanted?

I would've really supported the mods ten years ago. But having gotten the ire of a powermod and seeing how unfair I was treated; Now I'm just laughing at their tantrums.

Why would I go to bat for someone who smugly shut me down for a small disagreement?

In many cases, we've already helped teams reopen with no action beyond a conversation.

The language used in this media piece is just * Chef's Kiss *.

I think many users will be against the quisling mods who usurp power. I don't think it will be enough for most people to abandon the site, but there will be a small exodus continuing the site's slow decline.

I'm personally bearish on the possibility of either Reddit reconsidering their policy or a successful exodus to fairer lands.

I joined Reddit after the whole Digg affair, but I presume that it was nowhere near as entrenched as Reddit is today. Network effects are killer, as all the Twitter competitors found out to their chagrin.

Reddit really does have plenty of room for enshittification before it collapses, though it's trying it's hardest.

The social media landscape/ the internet as a whole is significantly more consolidated these days, I can count on the toes of an uncontrolled diabetic the number of communities that successfully spun off from Reddit (Drama, The Motte, Chapo?). It takes an unusually cohesive and dedicated userbase to pull off, the typical normie browsing sports subs is there pretty much entirely because it's the most popular venue, and they're unlikely to abandon ship till it reaches critical mass.

At any rate, I'm grateful that the Motte made it through mostly unscathed in its own transition, and I wonder if we were ever big enough for others to take note.

Drama, The Motte, Chapo?

TheDonald and, sigh, watchpeopledie.

Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network, OpieAndAnthony -> onaforums. Probably others, too.

There’s a meme that successful break-off communities are impossible, but it’s hopelessly out of date. General-purpose break-offs fail, but if people are in a habit of visiting specifically the community instead of just seeing it pop up occasionally on their front page, they will follow it to a new location. Honestly, fully unsuccessful community break-offs are rarer than successful ones at this point. The reddit diaspora is large and growing.

I doubt starting a general discussion community ever works. It seems to me that basically all the ones that exist started out as a discussion community for some specific thing, which then starts its own general channel for people into thing X to talk about anything.

TheDonald and, sigh, watchpeopledie.

Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network

Took a look at all of these. They look to be pale shadows of their former lives as subreddits. The Motte has taken a hit but at least still gets comparable weekly comment numbers to a year ago. I don't think you can cite any of these other four as success stories.

The Motte's peak was a lot lower than Donald/WatchPeopleDie, though

WhereAreAllTheGoodMen.

C*mtown too, for some definition of successful. There’s actually more than I thought, looking at this small list here.

Reddit is far from being in danger, but I think this move could be the start of a death spiral. The only reason people tolerate that this company essentially monopolized internet forums is the UX and tooling that's accrued over the years and network effects.

Remove the former and you're left with an extremely shitty website and app that only has "people use it" going for it.

And that's a premium target for competition. Especially for something as simple as a text forum where setting a competitor is extremely easy (compared to say, video hosting).

The network effects are bigger than Digg's ever were, but if that's all you have going for you you're a dead man waking. Someone will Facebook you eventually.

Reddit has no network effects. A community is community. The communities that are dedicated to sourdough pizza can thrive separately from the rough anal ones. So they can jump. It probably leaves the subscribers on /r/brutalanalwhileeatingpizza in a cold place. But there will probably be only a 100 of them.

?

I can clearly see network effects. Reddit is an agglomeration of communities on one convenient platform, I don't think the number of people laser focused on any one single sub or community is significant. Most people browse a diverse arrangement of subs, such that leaving Reddit as a whole for the sake of any single one would be a massive pain.

While I'm alright with The Motte being it's own thing, it itself lost a small amount of value and Reddit more when the two divorced, due to friction and loss of users.

People want switching between communities to be as easy as clicking on a drop down list, not the balkanization into forums that once was the norm.

Why do you think reddit killed off all the old forums, then?

I think it was just the convenience of being able to browse many forums on one site and join them with one click, instead of the tedious process of registering a name and password, and responding to a confirmation email, separately for every forum. At least that's what it was for me.

Right, that's just a network effect.

Depends which forums. I am still member of a couple which are as active and interesting as ever, although they have a fairly distinct profile. "Normie" forums probably died thanks to reddit.

For me the upvote/downvote mechanism did a lot better job of surfacing the most interesting things to read (posts and comments) that previous systems like Slashdot's moderation system.

The more I think of it and evolve my position on this whole reddit debacle: One of the greatest ironies of this whole situation is that, if you peel away the layers of this situation reddit has encouraged people to latch on causes and browbeating anyone who try to excercise independendent thought. Well they got a bunch of people who latch on to causes without thinking. Spez is all like "I <3 passive nihilists!" and being all surprised when they act like "passive nihilists".

Reddit moderators are kind of like Reddit employees only instead of getting paid with money, they get paid with power. Another difference is the top moderators mostly weren't hired. They just showed up and started working and then hired their friends.

The power they get is not an amount that Reddit determined they needed to give up in order to get them as employees. It's not the market wage. The moderators just lucked into their positions. Consequently, they're overpaid, and now they're trying to strike when their employer can replace them with the click of a button and they weren't their first choice as employees anyway. For every striking moderator, there are thousands of potential scabs who would leap at the opportunity, and there's also nothing like any kind of labour law that could protect them in anyway.

I'd guess some moderators, at least, would have noble aims of service and making things better/keeping things running in mind, motivating them more than the feeling of being in power?

I'd guess some moderators, at least, would have noble aims of service and making things better/keeping things running in mind, motivating them more than the feeling of being in power?

For a real community, like here, there will be people who love the forum and want to maintain it.

A place like /r/pics, on the other hand, is not a community, it's a dumping ground. Anyone selfless enough to do the thankless work like curating it out of pure civic mindedness would have glommed onto a worthier cause instead.

Nuking the third-party apps and killing pushshift are both overall surplus-destroying moves, especially since Reddit's search function does not work and their mobile app sucks (and mostly in ways that are orthogonal to extracting money from users!). I'm not entirely sure how the admins benefit from making the API prices this artificially high to kill apps? If you're worried about ads, why not just introduce an ad SDK for third-party mobile apps or require them to give you 50% of their in app purchase revenue or something. Also not sure that banning pushshift and requiring paid API access will stop scraping for LLMs, because normal web scraping of HTML the way archive.org, google, and everyone else does still works.

I've been using RedReader for years and they came out saying that they would function as before even with the API changes. What's nice about RR is that you don't even need an account to browse subreddits and it's ad-free.

Didn't something recently happen with the mods of /r/Battletech being replaced, and people rejoicing over there because it was The Wrong Sort of people getting kicked out?

That had nothing to do with the admins. The short version of that controversy was:

A group of BattleTech fans wrote a Pride Month themed fanzine about LGBT characters in BattleTech. The mod of /r/BattleTech didn't allow links to this fanzine, feeling that it breached the sub's rules against politics. There was a revolt among users, and Catalyst Game Labs, BattleTech's current publisher, said that they disagreed with this decision and supported the fanzine. They made a new 'official' sub, /r/OfficialBattleTech. At this point the mod of /r/BattleTech reversed his decision and posted a grovelling apology, and /r/BattleTech resumed as the central sub.

(Some long-running BattleTech authors also made comments, though they seem frankly bizarre - the Warrior trilogy criticises racism, sort of, it's still a story in which the heroic English/French/German states fight a moustache-twirling Fu Manchu stereotype, but there was one sympathetic Chinese character and there was a whole subplot about how samurai are cool, but that's a different issue to the present drama. 'Woke' is a motte-and-bailey. Amusingly Stackpole himself has also been criticised as a conservative.)

This is a particularly interesting incident, I think, because BattleTech has historically been a pretty right-wing property, fitting squarely into the right-leaning milSF genre. Previous BattleTech-adjacent controversies have often been in this direction - for instance, a few years back there was some drama because MechWarrior Online allowed people to have Confederate flag decals in game, but banned someone for spamming "trans rights" at the start of every game. More infamously, one of BattleTech's flagship authors for a while was Blaine Lee Pardoe, a solid, Trump-voting conservative. It's not worth rehearsing tired personal drama (he claimed someone stalked him), but he was eventually let go and now he writes bizarre alternate history/revenge fic about a Second American Civil War. So this is an interesting example of how what was probably a relatively conservative-leaning game and community has still been really subject to the hegemony of Pride Month.

It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards. I also find the politics of it bizarre - the Clans appear to be presented positively in it, despite being militarist eugenicist space fascists. So to me the whole thing comes off as something closer to 'rainbow fascism' than anything progressive. This is arguably consistent with the tone - the most recent BattleTech story arc, the IlClan arc, is basically pro-fascist (as in, genuinely in favour of fascism as a political ideology), but somehow they seem to have gotten away with it.

If this violates the leave-the-internet-at-the-door rule, please say so and I'll happily delete. I'm posting in spite of it because it seems relevant, but it's n=1 so no sweat if the rule comes first.

So I just got banned from my favorite Battletech discord server for very politely disagreeing (in fact, for saying no more than that I respectfully disagreed) with very severe new anti-anti-lgbt rules that even made having anything joke-like in your global pronoun field a bannable offense. Following this I was told that it was not acceptable to call for the annihilation of groups of people and that I shouldn't be a shithead, but that it was of course permissible to politely state one's opinion. I invoked that principle and stated that the language involved in the matter seemed excessively dramatic and directed at strawmen besides. I was called a troll and banned within seconds.

I'm getting similar vibes here that I got when I politely declined vaccination and suddenly half my family turned on me as if I were planning murder. People I presumed to be reasonable overtuning their reactions to benign disagreement. Other places just don't play by Motte rules.

It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards.

”Rawr.”

How on earth did people raise enough money to publish this sewer dredge?

It's not published. It's a fan work - you can download it here, if you like. That is a real quote from it.

Thinking about this some more, I came to an interesting realization:

Up to now, everything that Reddit did around this issue seemed boneheadedly stupid in pretty much every way. This might be the first psychologically smart thing they've done in this whole scandal.

Okay, I can see that they have an interest in and a right to make a fair amount of money off of their APIs and data. But why in the world do they have to jack the prices so high that third party apps are mostly unviable, and do it at such short notice that the few who thought they might be able to make it work can't get things arranged in time? I can't see how that benefits anyone. And why have they been sitting on their asses so long, ignoring all of the extra features and capabilities provided by third-party mobile apps and mod tools? It's like they don't even have a clue what those features are, how much difference each one makes, or how hard they would all be to implement themselves. Any dope could have come up with a fairer solution that lets the apps stay alive and still gets Reddit a cut of the money. It's framed as the stupid and thoughtless Reddit admins against the power users, who just want to contribute content and commentary basically for free.

I'm not super inclined by my side of the culture war to care about the Reddit PowerMod clique. But the issue was framed in such a way to paint it primarily as an attack against the more everyday Reddit powerusers, the people who post and comment a lot and usually prefer third-party mobile apps, and also taking out the disabled who depend on them, just for kicks I guess. So I felt like I at least weakly supported the blackout, though I didn't care enough to actually take any significant action based on it.

Now, with this new statement, Reddit has successfully re-framed the issue in my mind and, going by the sentiment I see around the internet, in the minds of many other users. Now it's the reasonable Reddit admins against a whiny and petulant clique of PowerMods who run all of the major subs with iron fists and revel in their tiny little empires. They're whining that their jobs might get a little bit harder, they think they're so great and awesome that they can't be replaced on a whim, and I feel happy to see them get proven wrong. The majority of Reddit users don't really care what app they have to use to access Reddit, many probably weren't even aware of these third-party apps at all, and they're starting to get pissed that their favorite places are being shuttered because the mods are throwing a tantrum as they see it.

I nuked my entire 9 year account last week. Wiped all my posts, nearly 5,000, and deleted. Reddit really lost the plot. Shame.

There are reports that Reddit is un-deleting comments that people have deleted. You might want to check if that actually worked or not.

Interesting. I'll do that. Even with the software I used the gold ones stayed, but I manually wiped those as well just out of spite.

edit： Yes a few are still there though [deleted] shows as author. Odd that tge search engine for my username (same as here) nevertheless turned up the posts.

No recourse, as my acct which could redelete them is gone. Thanks for telling me, though.

Its likely too late but https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite is a great tool. I wipe my reddit posts and close my accounts there every 6 months or so. This tool doesn't just delete them, though it can, it actually edits them first. I've mine set to edit the post to a single period (.) then delete it, so if they are restored it restores the (.)

Brilliant. Yes, that is the best way if one is intent on deletion. I was unaware it could be done en masse. I have an alt or two that I may decide to also wipe, so I will keep this in mind, thank you. There were a lot of little pieces of me floating around on reddit, and although it doesn't pain me as much as I might have thought it would to wipe those pieces from history, I do feel it's somehow a shame. But my disillusionment with reddit has now as much to do with its active userbase as the results of its admin decisions.

deleted

is there any place to keep track of mod scabbing stories?

Kiwi Farms thread (requires Tor, Brave, etc.)

Real shame he's been keeping it onion only. Though I do sympathize and don't really blame him for it.

He says he'll have time in a few weeks or so to get it back up on clearnet.

The main issue is that a certain transgender woman (along with an assistant) has been calling up the wives of ISP executives and harassing them to deny him service, in an attempt to scrub the internet clean of both of their histories of "consent accidents". Dealing with insane people like that requires an entirely new strategy.

That reminds me that I already have Tor installed on my phone, I appreciate the link.

While you're here, do you know any other interesting sites only found via Tor? I don't mean Darknet markets, but websites that were deplatformed from the clear web for various reasons, much like our beloved New Zealand farmer's forum.

Z-Library, a repository for ebooks with a flagrant disregard for copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library

I personally do not use Tor except for Kiwi Farms.

I tried loading that link in a Brave Tor window and got an error message.

The free internet is about to be beyond the reach of normal non-tech people like me.

Ideological zealots ready to sign up for the modgrinder. Hold fast sisters!

tl;dr: Do any of you read Portugese?

I am having one of those moments where I feel like I must be losing my mind, because the alternative is that the world is even stupider than I already thought, which is just too depressing to countenance. I was doing some research on education for what are, ultimately, culture war purposes (I think parents are more important than teachers, and I think people to my political Left get this horribly wrong all the time) and I came across a citation that seemed potentially useful. I found it in this document (PDF warning) as both the title and on page one:

Politics are an important influence in schools; as Paulo Freire stated in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act” (p.19).

Now, any time I see a reference to critical theory from the 1960s, it piques my interest, because it has been my experience that a lot of people work very hard to obfuscate the origins of what is currently being called "Wokism," and used to be called "cultural Marxism" (not to be confused with the conspiracy theory that "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory--I assume Paulo Freire was not a Jew, but I admit I do not know for sure). Anyway I immediately went looking for a copy of Paulo Freire's seminal work so I check the quote out in context. Fortunately, the author of the paper appears to be a music professor at McGill, so the citation is right there for my use!

Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

I fire up the Internet Archive and find a 1972 edition of the book (the UK printing, apparently) and turn to page 19, which... does not contain the quote. I pull up other editions--there's a 30th anniversary edition, a 50th anniversary edition, someone clearly regards this as an important text--and not only does the quote in question appear nowhere in these pages, but chunks like "education is political" or "neutral act" also return no results. Maybe the text search is wrong? Maybe the scan is bad? Hmm, no, a quick sampling finds the OCR did a bang-up job, actually.

Googling the full quote generates a number of results. The University of Sheffield's "Education Matters" blog gives the citation "Freire (1970: 19)." But no--the 1970 printing also lacks the quote. Dr. Fatima Nicdao (she/her) suggests it's actually (1968), but that's the Portugese date of publication, as near as I can tell. Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change is also pretty sure the quote appears on page 19, as does Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices and Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education, to name only three of the books that agree on this citation. You may notice that all of these books were published in the last two years.

At this point I'm thinking, "I've got to be missing something. Maybe I'm making this too difficult for myself. I haven't even checked Wikipedia!" There I find the following:

There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the "practice of freedom", the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

— Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire

(emphasis added)

At this point I am feeling increasingly confident that the quotation is spurious. Now, it seems pretty clear to me that Freire would agree with the quotation! I don't think any of these people are misrepresenting his view (though they might be oversimplifying it). I'm able to date the quote "teaching is never a neutral act" back as far as 1998, in a book entitled (of course) White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America Similarly, "all education is political" goes back at least as far as a textbook from 1996:

What are some examples of Freire's idea that all education is political?

As an aside, page 181 of that textbook is also of historic interest, and reads as part of a chapter on "Teaching to Empower Minority Students":

The emphasis on empowerment is part of a broader educational development referred to as critical theory. Critical theory developed from Paolo Freire's work, a reconsideration of the work of Dewey, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Lois Weis, Alma Flor Ada, Jim Cummins, Stanley Aronowitz, and others. The following concepts are central to critical theory, and are useful in trying to comprehend and analyze your own teaching experience.

(Here is the list, for the curious, with definitions elided.)

Consciousness ...

Culture ...

Domination ...

Empowerment ...

Ethics ...

Hegemony ...

Hidden Curriculum ...

Ideological Domination ...

Ideologies ...

Social Class ...

Social Construction of Knowledge ...

Anywhow, I am terminally crippled with self-doubt, and proving a negative is hard. Part of me is certain that the very first reply to this rant is going to be "oh here's a direct link to the page where he wrote that, you just missed it." But I cannot find any evidence at all that Paolo Freire ever actually wrote the sentence, "all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act." Certainly those words do not seem to appear in any English-language translation of anything he has written. Which, who cares, right? Spurious quotations are totally an Internet thing, Abraham Lincoln said so.

But I care, because now instead of finding an academically useful citation I've spent three hours going down the rabbit hole of a spurious quotation. How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source? I mean, I guess this is in the end just a particularly academic example of the old "too good to check." But I'm frustrated in part because none of the foregoing accomplishes what I actually intended to accomplish today, which was to make progress on a scholarly paper. There's no place for me to publish a peer-reviewed essay entitled "Spurious Quotations in Education Theory: Jesus Christ You Critical Theorists Are the Worst Academics Alive, Check Your God Damn Sources For Once, You're a Fucking Embarrassment to the Profession."

So please. Embarrass me, instead. Find evidence that Freire actually wrote the quoted phrase. Somewhere, anywhere, in any language! Because right now I'm feeling extremely uncharitable toward my outgroup on this, and it's such a petty thing, I know, but it just feels emblematic of the entire critical enterprise of focusing on "whatever works" over and above any commitment to truth, facts, history, academic rigor, professionalism, or even taking two seconds to check the damn source.

Incorrectly-cited quotations are incredibly common, to the point where they are more common that correctly-cited ones. It's surprising how many people do this who should know better. You've probably repeated a few yourself.

This type of error was likely near universal in the past. In modern times, we at least have the ability to look it up. Wikiquote and Quote Investigator are good resources for this.

A good heuristic for writers is that all quotations are fake unless you can find it in a primary source. Even then, there's no guarantee that the phrase wasn't originally coined by someone else.

You've probably repeated a few yourself.

I haven't created the impression in you that I'm actually extremely neurotic about quotation authenticity?

...uh, well, good!

Looks like a classic case of citogenesis, hmm? /u/gwern really is a national treasure.

It probably won’t make you feel any better, but this sort of thing is much more likely than we might prefer!

Hold on. From the 30th anniversary ed., p. 34. This is the last page of the foreword, written by one Richard Shaull:

There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of a younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the “practice of freedom,” the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

So, uh…who the hell is Jane Thompson? The quote traces back to here. In turn, Jane L. Thompson wrote a book called Adult Education for a Change in 1980. But what’s this? She was just quoting, too! Her citation brings us to

Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin, 1972).

Full circle.

So, uh…who the hell is Jane Thompson?

...this is worse than I thought!?

The Wikipedia citation goes to the book

Mayo, Peter (1999). Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action. London: Zed Books. ISBN 978-1-85649-614-8.

On page 5 of that book, the quote is indeed attributed to Jane Thompson, as the editor of another book. The Gramsci book is on archive.org, the footnote points us to a 1980 text by Thompson, Adult Education for Change at page 26 (but also repeated in a different text by M. Mayo). That book is also on archive.org, and when you turn to page 26, you can see Thompson has block-quoted the block-quoted text, which she attributes to Paulo Freire! But return to the 1972 Freire text and you will see that, no, that quote is definitely part of Shaull's introduction to the book.

Just... astonishing. Multiple misattributions, literally none of the people quoting Shaull had any idea what they were doing. Words fail me.

It probably won’t make you feel any better, but this sort of thing is much more likely than we might prefer!

I actually deal with it with students all the time, because Plato is up there with Mark Twain and Winston Churchill among the pantheon of the spuriously-quoted. So a student will tell me something is in Republic and build their whole paper around it... and I will ask them where in Republic Plato makes this claim, and they will show me the website where someone claims Plato said that, and it will be wrong. So yeah, you're not wrong. But it sure is annoying to have to deal with it from colleagues rather than from students.

I just want you to know that I’m losing my mind trying to find it, now. See my edits.

And see my other response! Looks like we followed the same breadcrumbs. What a disaster.

EDIT: If you look through the Wikipedia page history, you'll see that at some point Shaull did get correctly credited for the quote, but someone checked the cited source (with the incorrect attribution) and "corrected" the correction.

How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source?

As an average Joe and non-academic, I just assume that a sizeable chunk of papers and citations are just made up and I look on requests for "source?" and quasi-religious appeals to "peer review" with an increasingly jaundiced eye. I think that a lot of this is probably not malicious, since I too have copied quotations from second or third hand sources without checking the original when writing undergrad papers, but that doesn't make this any less of a problem.

The usual retort is along the lines of "it might not be the perfect system, but it's the best one we've got." I'm not sure I agree. A tabloid magazine article claiming something outrageous is easy for people to evaluate and accept, reject, or suspend judgment. In contrast, a published study filled with impressive sounding words and using complicated statistical methods appears cloaked in a mantle of authority, expertise, and erudition has much more power to simply overawe plebs into accepting its conclusion.

This sloppy, lazy, or ideologically motivated science has the potential to be very harmful to a person's project of building a useful and accurate model of their world because when it's wrong, it's wrong in cleverer , deeper, more subtle ways than, say, the tabloid example above. A great analogy is "The Book" from Anathem:

Since the sole purpose of the Book was to punish its readers, the less said of it the better. To study it, to copy it out, and to memorize it was an extraordinary form of penance.

[...]

There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane.

Beyond about Six, the punishment could span years. Many chose to leave the concent rather than endure it. Those who stuck it out were changed when they emerged: subdued, and notably diminished. Which might sound crazy, because there was nothing to it other than copying out the required chapters, memorizing them, and then answering questions about them before a panel of hierarchs. But the contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless: flagrantly at first, more subtly as the chapters progressed. It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2 = 3. Chapter One was a page of nursery-rhymes salted with nonsense-words that almost rhymed-but not quite. Chapter Four was five pages of the digits of pi. Beyond that, however, there was no further randomness in the Book, since it was easy to memorize truly random things once you taught yourself a few tricks-and everyone who’d made it through Chapter Four knew the tricks. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time-after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. After their authors had been humiliated and Thrown Back, these writings would be gone over by the Inquisition, and, if they were found to be the right kind of awful, made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots. It was more humiliating than you might imagine, and after I’d been toiling on Chapter Five for a couple of weeks I had no difficulty in seeing how one who completed a sentence of, say, Chapter 9 would emerge permanently damaged.

I like that analogy a lot.

This sloppy, lazy, or ideologically motivated science has the potential to be very harmful to a person's project of building a useful and accurate model of their world because when it's wrong, it's wrong in cleverer , deeper, more subtle ways than, say, the tabloid example above.

To this I would add: discovery of the problem also leads to similar harms. At some point every single one of these authors either (A) thought nothing of cribbing a cite from someone else without verifying it, or (B) wondered if they should check the cite, and then did not, or (C) checked the cite, decided to use the fake one anyway. I think that's an exhaustive list. In the case of (A), they basically are trusting any claim they happen to like, which is bad; in the case of (B), they are lazy scholars at best, and in the case of (C), they're actively deceptive. None of these possibilities rises to a level of "trustworthy professional," and I think that fact raises serious questions about other things they say and do. It impeaches their character as scholars. And rightly so! But this contributes to the ongoing crisis of confidence in our epistemic elites.

I found it in this document (PDF warning) as both the title and on page one:

Politics are an important influence in schools; as Paulo Freire stated in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act” (p.19).

There are a number of things wrong with the quotation in the PDF. First off, the source material (though not your own quotation!) misspells the author as “Friere.” Second, the cited book is not in the bibliography. Third, the language in the quotation (English) is wrong. It should be Spanish, as this work was first published in Spanish translation in Mexico.* Finally, the statement is too pithily set forth to be the author’s own words (in whatever language).

In other words, it has all the hallmarks of an apocryphal quotation.

Its existence is perpetuated by the academic need to hang every insight with clout in the field, no matter how banal, on a academic theorist. Feire’s writings basically make this point, albeit in a roundabout form that is rather inconvenient to quote properly. More careful academics will not attribute this phrase as a direct quotation (as does the author in the PDF). Interesting, this paraphrase is not original to the PDF author, so it cannot really be unquoted either. Thus, it is not surprising that the paraphrase gets misrepresented as an actual quote and this apocryphal citation gets cribbed from source to source, because it efficiently does the academic work it needs to do.

Because right now I'm feeling extremely uncharitable toward my outgroup on this, and it's such a petty thing, I know, but it just feels emblematic of the entire critical enterprise of focusing on "whatever works" over and above any commitment to truth, facts, history, academic rigor, professionalism, or even taking two seconds to check the damn source.

It’s not “two seconds” to check a source: you’ve already spent more time on it than that. And it still has not been checked. No one has pulled up the 1968 original edition, which doesn’t seem to be online and does not seem to be stocked in North American academic libraries. So how is an academic to handle it? Well, most would check the edition they do have at hand to find a page they can cite and, failing that, they assume that their peer-reviewed source got the cite to the inaccessible edition correct and they simply reproduce that. They might get more skeptical if the quotation seemed wrong, but it does encapsulate what the guy is trying to say.

Plus, the sentiment seems to assume that critical theorists’ writings are found in a single source (“the damn source”). Actually, it’s a confusing mess. Their publication histories are inevitably complex, being reprinted and republished multiple times, in multiple editions, multiple languages, and even multiple (discordant) translations. Most academics just cite the reader or book they have in their personal libraries. In this situation, differences are sure to happen and they are tolerated, because it’s a pain to check whether a quotation in some other edition is correct. And it’s tolerated because these critical thinkers stand for their ideas more than their words. There’s no citational archeology to find the original statement in the original edition and the original language. It’s not the Bible.

  • Or so Wikipedia tells me.

Well, since we're here.

Do you think there's such a thing as a neutral education process?

Do you think there's such a thing as a neutral education process?

I do not!

Not sure what else to say about it, though. Cultural reproduction is a really complicated proposition even in monocultures; in places with values pluralism, you're basically always going to be goring someone's ox. What Freire (and all the crits) tend to get wrong is that they decline to subject their own proposed solutions to the standards of their own critique. At best their position basically boils down to "yes, your way is not neutral, I guess our way is also not technically neutral but noticing that makes us the good guys so it's okay when we do it." Contemporary identity politics is just yeschad.jpg-ing your own views while wojacking your opponent's.

Contemporary identity politics is just yeschad.jpg-ing your own views while wojacking your opponent's.

always_has_been.jpg

It depends on what you think education is intended to accomplish. I think a useful heuristic is to assume that education teaches someone how to think, indoctrination teaches someone what to think. But I think to educate people properly, at times it requires the interplay of both forces. People need a foundation of knowledge that doesn't derive from every individual having to reinvent the wheel, intellectually, but that doesn't come from people's mere curiosity. You need to uncritically build that foundation in people, as an authority figure; from first principles.

How could you teach someone how to think without introducing a frame that also teaches them what to think. How to think is a slightly larger space than what to think. But both are indoctrination.

People need a foundation of knowledge that doesn't derive from every individual having to reinvent the wheel, intellectually, but that doesn't come from people's mere curiosity.

I agree that you need to do that to create functional people, but it's still indoctrination. The unfortunate truth is that you need to indoctrinate children.

You need to uncritically build that foundation in people, as an authority figure; from first principles.

First principles are, by their nature, arbitrary. Actually, that's not fair, they aren't arbitrary, they are selected because of their relative usefulness. But they cannot be more or less true than other first principles exactly because they are first principles.

Biblical Truth: Everything the bible says is true. The bible should used as the decider for any dispute. Is a first principle.

The law of non contradiction: "Not both A and not A" or "¬(p ∧ ¬p)". Is another first principle.

There is no way to show that one is fundamentally more true than the other, because they are first principles. You need to use first principles to evaluate the truth of a statement.

Therefore, all education is indoctrination. In many ways, but at the very least in terms of first principles. Which is already going to account for a lot of indoctrination.

Therefore, all education is indoctrination

This is wrong on its face. Words have meaning. Teaching a child basic algebra and 1+1=2 and the multiplication table is not "political" nor is it indoctrination. Teaching a child that the brown folx don't need to learn no colonizer math and infact there are indigenous ways of knowing is indoctrination.

Only an ideologue hellbent on using his teaching position as a way to indoctrinate children would say "all education is indoctrination".

Cleary from what I said, I disagree with you. I think all teaching is indoctrination. Do you think I am an "ideologue hellbent on using his teaching position as a way to indoctrinate children". I am not a teacher. I am absolutely not interested in indoctrinating the children of anyone else. I am interested in indoctrinating my own future children.

The indoctrination position you lay out is left wing. I am right wing and still stand by my position.

I don't know about "hellbent" but I am in favor of recognizing that it is normal and healthy to indoctrinate the children of my groups into a worldview. Not just teach the facts, but a coherent moral worldview. I don't think that is possible to avoid. Or if it is possible to avoid you will simply end up with children who are profoundly alienated. More likely, you will end up with children who become indoctrinated into some other groups worldview, one that is hostile to you. That is what happens to many children today, they are not indoctrinated enough by their parents so they're indoctrinated by radical leftists.

Attempts to avoid indoctrinating children into any moral/political worldview whatsoever do those children a disservice. Humans are, as Aristotle says "Political Animals". In general we want to belong to a worldview. Failing to provide that for children just makes them vulnerable to being snapped up by hostile ideologies.

I am not a teacher, and I do not want teachers indoctrinating my children. But I would like to raise them to align with my worldview and I recognize that that is indoctrination. I am not a totalitarian about how to raise children, I am happy to make space for them to question things. I mean, I'm here on the motte, I love a good argument and hope my children will express a healthy level of contrarianism. But I will not attempt to avoid bringing them into my culture and worldview. That would be cruel, so I am comfortable with indoctrinating them.

I'm curious. So, generally, people indoctrinating can think that the things that they are trying to indoctrinate into are true, right? Like I assume, in the example given, the people tend to think that

So what makes something indoctrination, rather than merely teaching? Is it that it's unsupported (but surely there are all sort of things that are taught without citations, that we think is good and proper—"don't touch the stove" has no proof attached, unless they ignore your education/indoctrination)? Is it that it's not true, and so propagating wrong beliefs in general is indoctrination? I imagine the most likely stance is something like "inclining them towards a faction in an ongoing controversy," but that would seem to involve things we wouldn't want—e.g. people with familiarity with economics are more pro-market than the general population (let's assume the causation runs in that direction, that was my experience upon learning what little economics I have learned), and so teaching someone economics would be indoctrination, regardless of how demonstrable it is? Or is it whether there's ongoing controversy among the experts in particular?

The lines feel blurry.

So what makes something indoctrination, rather than merely teaching?

I wanted to go with something like "indoctrination is about values, teaching is about facts", but I think it's broader than that. If I had to boil it down to a single thing, I'd call it something like "openness to critical examination". Economics is superficially about facts, but a Marxist is going to be hostile to the idea that capitalism is good, Keynesian-descendant economists are going to be hostile to the idea that government stimulus might be counter productive, and libertarian-descendant economists will be hostile to the idea that a bad outcome could come out of anything other than government intervention.

I'm pretty sure a significant portion of the population ends up being indoctrinated into ideas that are true, rather than taught them. Everybody knows the Earth is round, but the average person would probably make a fool of themselves trying to debate a devoted Flat Earther.

That seems like a fine definition as long as you're okay with some indoctrination being just fine to do, which I think the previous poster would not have liked.

Yeah, when it comes to values I don't think it's possible to do anything other than indoctrination. I suppose you could do "Group X believes in A, B, and C, while group Y believes in D, E, and F", but you do have to teach what is the right thing to do at some point.

For me the issue is that I consider it to be the fundamental right and duty of the parents, not the state, or any private institution not authorized by the parents. The state indoctrinating children kind of makes a mockery of the very idea of democracy.

Honestly it ain't that blurry. There's "facts" about the world as far as the teacher/establishment understands them and there is "what ought to be done about the state of the world" sort of material, that's an entirely different thing. Further the teacher if they are interested in raising an army for culture war reasons understands full well taht certain things are held to be true by broader society and certain things are held to be true only by their own faction.

How would "infact there are indigenous ways of knowing" be indoctrination under this basis? That would not seem to be an ethical statement.

Secondly, are you saying that indoctrination is based upon factions? Does it cease to become indoctrination as the factions become smalle? For example, is saying that the actual nazis were doing bad things and you shouldn't do things like that indoctrination? What about saying that it seems like the global temperature rising was caused by humans?

You're wrong that these things can be easily separated.

I am not a fundamentalist christian. Some fundamentalist christians do not believe in evolution. In fact, evolutionary theory is directly contradictory to what they do believe.

There's "facts" about the world as far as the teacher/establishment understands them and there is "what ought to be done about the state of the world" sort of material,

If I was a science teacher for their children, I would want to teach them evolution (assuming I am following your definition of what is and isn't indoctrination). Evolution is a "'fact' about the world as far as the teacher understands it". However, me simply teaching what I believe to be factual, despite not being a moral value to me or a description of what a person ought to do, would be a threat to their worldview.

My simply providing what I see as facts would be hostile to them. Therefore, personally I would not want to do that - as that seems immoral to me. I would be indoctrinating their children into a worldview that was hostile to the worldview of their parents.

Do you see how I think all education is indoctrination, despite the fact that I am not trying to "raise an army for culture war reasons"? I am actively laying out boundaries of how not to do that.

I essentially agree with you almost completely. That's actually the case I was making. Maybe the only thing I'd disagree with is the claim that all education is indoctrination.

The law of non contradiction: "Not both A and not A" or "¬(p ∧ ¬p)". Is another first principle.

That one's pretty uncontroversial, but the more interesting one is the law of excluded middle: "either A or not A". We all learn it, but there's a school of thought (intuitionism) that this shouldn't be a basic law. And indeed there are some weeeeeeeird results in math that go away (or become less weird) if you don't allow proof by contradiction.

That one’s pretty uncontroversial

Well…

Nah.

This Friere guy has the right idea—banking vs. libertarian education is a neat phrasing of the problem. You could cut 90% of the critical oppressor/oppressed narrative, though, and nothing of value would be lost.

Maybe he suffered from success in that it seems obvious in hindsight? Rote memorization has gotten a pretty bad reputation over the years. As has top-down educational intervention, to the point of becoming a stock villain.

Yes.

Leaving a child near a hot stove will teach them something, and has nothing to do with a 'present system' or with world transformation.

How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source?

When I search on Google Scholar for that quote, I find only the source you link. Ditto when I search for the two phrases, “all education is political” “teaching is never a neutral act”. So, basically no one is publishing that quote. What people ARE doing is paraphrasing Freire as saying that all education is political and that education is never neutral. Which, as you note, is an accurate paraphrase of his claims. (This master's thesis, which might or might not quote accurately, attributes the following quote to Freire's Pedagogy of Freedom)

Education as a specifically human action has a “directive” vocation, that is, it addresses itself to dreams, ideals, utopias, objectives, to what I have been calling the “political” nature of education. In other words, the quality of being political is inherent in its essence. In fact, neutrality in education is impossible. Not impossible because irresponsible or subversive teachers so determined or because some teacher or another decided so.

When I search on Google Scholar for that quote, I find only the source you link. Ditto when I search for the two phrases, “all education is political” “teaching is never a neutral act”. So, basically no one is publishing that quote.

I directly linked three books from academic presses from the last two years, an academic blog, an academic tweet, and an academic paper, and I only furnished a sampling of what I found because it just seemed silly to keep going after finding so many examples. That's a far, far cry from "basically no one."

What people ARE doing is paraphrasing Freire

The numerous, recent sources I already cited literally directly quote him, often giving a page number (usually, 19) for the quote. Are you... engaged in performance art here? Duplicating the phenomenon about which I am complaining?

So, when instead of searching on Google Scholar I instead search for the exact quote in regular old google, I get 19 hits, one of which is you. When I search for “all education is political" "teaching is never a neutral act” freire, I get 91 hits, including you. That is pretty much "basically no one." As others have noted, you are complaining about lazy quotations, an unfortunately very common phenomenon, but one which in this case at least has the merit of accurately representing the views of the cited author.

  • -12

I really admire how smoothly you were able to combine the implication "basically no one is doing this, who cares" with the implication "this happens all the time, who cares" in this comment. If that move hasn't got a fancy name like "motte and bailey doctrine" or "apophasia," then it should, and if it does have a name, I would like to learn it.

Well, if you can't understand the difference between an empirical claim about a general phenomenon and and empirical claim about a specific phenomenon, then I can't help you.

But to be more explicit, your post seems to me to be little more than "boo outgroup", and 1) your evidence that your outgroup is doing what you claim is incredibly weak; and 2) you have no evidence that what that handful of outgroup members has done is unique to your outgroup, so, yes, who cares?

And to be completely clear, those who cite Freire seem to me to almost always be full of shit. Especially some former colleagues of mine who literally argued that the fact that "teaching is inevitably political" gave them license to push their political views in class, when of course it actually means that they had a responsibility to present students with views they disagreed with.

  • -13

But to be more explicit, your post seems to me to be little more than "boo outgroup"

The "more" is really the important part, though. I admit these people are in my "outgroup" but the point was the sloppy scholarship (and my disbelief), not the outgroup per se.

your evidence that your outgroup is doing what you claim is incredibly weak

My evidence that the individual scholars I am directly complaining about are doing exactly what I am complaining about seems pretty ironclad to me, to the point where I doubt it could possibly be so straightforward, to the point where I asked a bunch of Internet strangers if they could maybe check the Portugese for me because surely these scholars aren't that stupid but--yes, these scholars are apparently at least that stupid. To the point where @netstack immediately identified a separate case of this same phenomenon happening in other articles referencing Freire.

you have no evidence that what that handful of outgroup members has done is unique to your outgroup, so, yes, who cares?

I care, as I believe I stated in my original comment. It's offensive to me, as a professional, when other professionals do shoddy work, especially when it costs me time. If that's not enough for you, like, okay! You should go talk to someone who counts in your eyes, instead of telling me that I shouldn't care about things that I care about.

And to be completely clear, those who cite Freire seem to me to almost always be full of shit.

This is how I feel about all critical theorists, but surely it helps matters to present the occasional clear case of academic malfeasance. I don't regard them to be full of shit because reasons, I regard them to be full of shit because look here are dozens of examples of easily-identified shitty scholarship on just one quotation.

For what it’s worth, I do think this sort of OP pushes the boundaries of

Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?'

“Boo outgroup” isn’t a rule. It works as a report category, though, because it requires toeing a number of others. Being a bit uncharitable or a bit general or a bit angry at Those People is normal. Feeling all of those at once is a recipe for less-than-clear thinking. It’s also a good way to get other people to make the same generalizations.

So I sympathize with @Gdanning. Your OP got my hackles raised. I made my response anyway because, well, the object level really was dumb. Not terribly surprising (per the gwern link), but dumb, and therefore a good distraction.

I maintain that, if posting like that were normalized, this community would be much worse-off.

I maintain that, if posting like that were normalized, this community would be much worse-off.

I literally implored y'all to show me I'm wrong. I actually wanted to be wrong about this. I wanted someone to show me the quote, maybe in Portugese, so I could say, "ah, yes, I'm a dumbass, that's much less surprising than all of these doctorate-wielding people being such complete dumbasses." That wasn't rhetoric; I came here to test my shady thinking, I wanted to be talked down, and the second thing you did was find another horrible example right there in the material I was citing.

That suggests to me that I'm not criticizing these people because they're my outgroup and I want to boo them, but in fact because they have earned criticism. Surely that's a valuable thing to learn?

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This is all strange internet stuff, you've contradicted your own stance.

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surely it helps matters to present the occasional clear case of academic malfeasance. I don't regard them to be full of shit because reasons, I regard them to be full of shit because look here are dozens of examples of easily-identified shitty scholarship on just one quotation.

Except that you don't have any evidence of academic malfeasance nor shitty scholarship; as I noted, a search of google scholar turns up nothing.

And, surely, it is not sloppy quotation practices which make you deem them full of shit, is it? Surely it is stuff like this:

"For example, think about the Resident Assistant system, where you have to report these fellow undergrads, whom for whatever reason, are drunk. Rather than center care practices of holistic healing, or therapy, they’re disciplined before they can understand themselves in this way. That is not benefiting people of color. It's not benefiting folks going towards their true passions. But it's really going to maintain the status quo. So, policing looks like surveillance in and out of the classroom, and it looks like literal police, and it looks like all of the systems of control that we have at UC Santa Cruz: for example, to surveil our fellow students. So it looks like the regents, whom have nothing to do with education, but are overseeing us. Overseeing. Do I have to spell it out for you? "

Emphasis in original.

Except that you don't have any evidence of academic malfeasance nor shitty scholarship; as I noted, a search of google scholar turns up nothing.

Look, this is not really a fight I'm interested in having, but in my opinion Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit and I don't know anyone who does use it for anything because it is shit. To my mind, by far the most useful academic tool to appear in the last, I'm going to say 20 years, is just Archive.org's online library. Probably some people love Google Scholar so this is just me having thoughts about a thing, but I haven't got any other response for you here. I've never seen anyone try to prove anything of worth by citing to "Google Scholar says" so I'm just kind of dumbfounded about it. Maybe I am just old, that is often a problem when matters of technology come into play, but there you have it. Google's front page search is orders of magnitude more valuable to my scholarship than Google Scholar has ever been.

But I don't do STEM, so, you know. YMMV.

And, surely, it is not sloppy quotation practices which make you deem them full of shit, is it?

See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate. The weird culture war stuff is bad, too, but it might be helpful for me to suggest that when I refer to these scholars as my "outgoup," I am about 60% thinking about the fact that they work in colleges of education, rather than thinking about their political alignment qua outgroup. That is, these are education scholars, often with Ed.Ds, while I'm a philosopher who sometimes writes analytically on education.

It's hard to not launch into a rant about this, honestly. And it feels like a failure of professional courtesy to be like, "oh, those teaching academics are the worst" when I'm sure the engineers or the business professors or someone feels the same about me. But the scholarship that comes out of these colleges of education, like, it's just so bad, basically all the time. And it happens to have kind of played havoc on my day, today, and I thought others might find it interesting to see a specific case, about specific people, making a specific mistake, that is kind of emblematic of the larger criticisms leveled against them.

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your post seems to me to be little more than "boo outgroup",

Exhaustively researched primary sources are "boo outgroup," but warmed-over theschism reposts about boomers being white supremacists is fine? How much of the literature would he have to read before the post was acceptable?

The point is not how exhaustive his research was; I have no doubt that the language is either misquoted or miscited. The problem is the "boo outgroup" inference that he draws therefrom.

You seem to be trolling.

Transnational Thursdays 4

Thanks to @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola for the name. As before, all folks are encouraged to add to any of these or to add coverage of any countries they’re interested in, the more the merrier.

Argentina

Despite recent polls showing the libertarian Javier Millei in a three way tie with mainstream parties for the presidential election, 60% of voters oppose his proposal of dollarization and no candidate of his scored above 15% in the provincial elections. Juntos por el Cambio, the Center Right opposition party, scored big in the long time Peronist stronghold of San Luis and otherwise the mainstream parties consolidated their holds on the provinces they already governed. They are supposed to formally announce coalitions this morning so I may edit that in later.

The government has announced another debt swap as part of their ongoing effort to restructure debt obligations. Inflation continues to climb at breakneck speeds from 100% a few weeks ago to 149% this week.

Colombia

President Gustavo Petro has successfully negotiated a six month cease fire with the rebel group ELN*, starting in August. This is a major victory for internal stability and fulfills one of Petro’s central campaign promises. Unfortunately he doesn’t have much time to celebrate as the conservative Attorney General continues his investigations into corruption in the Petro’s Administration, this time looking into alleged illegal campaign financing.

  • A previous edition of these said Petro was formerly part of ELN, that was my mistake; he was a member of M19

Guatemala

Guatemala’s high profile persecution of a journalist critical of the regime has ended in a widely criticized sentence of six years. Elections are Sunday the 25th (though they will likely go to a runoff in August). After banning the three most popular anti-establishment candidates, the remaining candidates are all different flavors of establishment, frequently literally the children of previous Presidents. Most noticeable is Zury Ríos, daughter of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, famous for his (US backed) genocide of the indigenous Mayans. Ríos is a controversial figure for her defense of her father, and has run twice before and never finished better than third. However, she is currently the front runner (following Carlos Pineda being banned), running on a campaign of imitating Salvadoran President Bukele’s security approach for the gangs in Guatemala. She is trailed by Sandra Torres of the Social-Democrat party, former First Lady and runner up in the previous two elections, possibly headed for a third.

Turkey

JP Morgan estimates that Erdogan will kick off his new term by finally raising interest rates possibly up 25%. They predict a recession in the short term, but hopefully the pain needn’t be long if they can restore the confidence of international investors. Foreign Policy expects his new term to be defined by a continually assertive foreign policy, especially as a broker in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and now the Balkans as well. NATO continues to largely be at Turkey’s whims with regards to Sweden’s accession.

Iran

Three months after the Saudi-Iran Peace Accords, Iran has yet to deescalate on any front. The war in Yemen rages on, Iranians have repeatedly targeted Americans in Syria, interfered with sea trade (1,2), and continued to direct their proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine to shell Israel. The Biden Administration, long having given up on resurrecting a nuclear deal and unwilling to go full force against Iran, has listed towards steady de-escalation, foregoing retaliation against Iran for its attacks or build up of uranium reserves, and allowing it to skirt some sanctions and access previously frozen funds.

India

45,000 people have been evacuated from India’s Gujarat State (and 60,000 from neighboring Pakistan’s Sindh Province) in anticipation of Thursday’s Biparjoy Cyclone. Ethnic violence in BJP dominated Manipur State has reached highly serious levels: “More than 130 people have died in the state, and another 60,000 displaced from their homes. People have ransacked 4,573 weapons from police armories and destroyed 250 churches. So grave is the situation that many residents have chosen to escape to neighboring Myanmar, where the ruling military junta is conducting aerial bombing campaigns against its own citizens.” @self_made_human any details to add?

Eritrea

Eritrea is pretty much never in the news because of its extreme political isolation under the thirty year dictatorship of Isiais Afwerki, who looks like your friendly neighbor over the fence but who actually turned Eritrea into one of the least free countries in the world, frequently coming in dead last for freedom of press and recently hitting a three way tie with North Korea and Mauritania for prevalence of slavery. However, after sixteen years of absence, Eritrea has decided to rejoin the East African regional block, Inter-Governmental Authority on Development. This will restore trade ties as well as security collaboration channels.

Sudan

The latest 24 hour ceasefire ended and violence began again immediately, with fighting increasingly growing more in the RSF home base of Darfur. “More than 1.6 million people to leave their homes for safer areas inside Sudan, according to the International Organization for Migration. About 530,000 others fled to the neighboring countries of Egypt, South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic, and Libya.”

Nigeria

Nigeria’s Progressive new leader Bola Tinubu officially took the Presidency two weeks ago and started things off with a bang by ending a fuel subsidy that strained Nigeria’s finances. This caused fuel prices to immediately spike, sending off significant unrest throughout the country. Bloomberg reports that an internal government committee has recommended Nigeria continue to sell off its state assets in oil, killing two birds with one stone by raising finances and boosting efficiency in the petroleum sector, thus ideally helping to fulfill Tinubu’s ambitious campaign pledge to triple oil production.

Tinubu has also suspended and has now arrested the head of the Central Bank Godwin Emefiele. The charges are vague and based around economic mismanagement, specifically around a controversial policy that caused a currency shortage. However, it’s worth noting Emefiele was Tinubu’s opponent in his party’s primary so is something of a political rival.

Jihadist attacks have spiked recently as well, which does not bode well for Tinubu’s campaign promise to restore peace. However, the new National Assembly has now been sworn in with Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress party holding majorities in both chambers, so he can begin to appoint a cabinet and make use of his mandate to address the twin maladies of the economy and terrorism.

I'm really not the right guy for in-depth political analysis in India, but in the absence of anyone better I'll step up to the plate:

NE India is largely divorced from the rest of the country, by geography and ethnicity to boot. The majority of the tribes that live in those parts resemble the denizens of Myanmar, Tibet or Nepal more than other parts of India, but even that's belying the ethnolinguistic diversity lurking there. The tribes have their own concerns, with them often being at each others throats over historical grievances, religion, or an effort to get gibs.

In this case, it's the latter, one of the Hindu tribes once successfully lobbied to be granted privileged status affirmative action-wise, causing an uproar in their Christian counterparts, who are afraid of being squeezed out, or more cynically, just as eager to get their stamp of disprivilege and run with it. After all, the coveted Scheduled Tribe status comes with economic and political benefits, and everyone wants a piece.

The extremely hilly terrain means that regional powers dominate the region more than the central government would like, especially given many decades of Maoist insurgency that only relatively recently calmed down. The border with Myanmar is porous, although the majority of Rohingya ended up in Bangladesh instead of NE India, that's still a major point of contention today.

So one tribe is taking the fuck you, got mine approach, and the other wants to join in the fun, prompting violence and rioting. The Indian government loves to cut off Internet access if someone looks at them funny, so there's an information blackout in those parts.

Frankly, most of India doesn't give a shit, violence there is unlikely to percolate to the rest of the country. None of the parties are particularly sympathetic, this is textbook sectarian strife in the arsehole of India, we've seen worse and will likely see more of the same for a while now.

Nah that was great, much appreciated.

I've heard now several times that the Kuki are nearly the same ethnic group as Myanmar's Chin. Do you know if there any recedivism or recruitment between the Chin National Army and their Indian counterparts or do they mostly see each other as unrelated peoples?

I don't have the faintest idea! It's simply not something I ever looked into, but if I had to bet, I'd bet against it simply because the actual ongoing rebellion in Myanmar hasn't spilled into India barring the refugee crisis. I'd hope that if large amounts of men and materiel were becoming involved in the war, that I'd have heard something about it, but that's weak evidence at best.

To give you an idea of how little thought anyone gives the place, imagine suddenly accosting a random American Mottizen and wanting to know the minute details of the geopolitics in Puerto Rico.

I doubt any of the other Indians here I know are better prepared to answer that, and there's nothing on that particular topic I could tell you that wouldn't involve me googling the same things you would haha.

There seem to be quite a few potentially relevant articles that come up when you search Google Scholar for kuki chin insurgency.

Interesting, looks like it's an insurgent group in Bangladesh that has definitely received weapons from the Kachin rebels and possibly the Karen, but I can't figure out if they've worked with the Chin National Army. It does seem like they've hid and trained in the Kuki-dominant Indian state of Mizoram and that's also where a lot of them have fled to from the violence. Mizoram itself had a strong secessionist movement for a long time but signed a peace treat with India in '86.

I know very little about this specific issue, but I do know that insurgencies often do tend to spread across borders

What's the political obstacle stopping Argentina from reducing inflation? You'd think at 150% it would be so bad that people would vote for literally anything to stop it. I don't get what they could be funding with money printing that people could feel was worth it.

Agentina at this point has a terminal case of populism, from what I understand. This plus central bank being subservient to the whims of the state, plus simple export-driven economy where diverting labor from agriculture to industry eliminates surpluses, plus human capital flight… Really a proof for why independent CB is valuable. And low time preference is indispensable.

On the other hand, a good use case for crypto.

The largest problem is that the central government doesn’t control spending. This is why the terminal case of money printing exists, Argentina’s constitution is extremely fucked up and resembles a combination of the pre-civil war US, the EU and a modern federal country. Provinces are supreme other than some powers they nominally ‘delegate’ to the federal government. There are like 20 provinces and many are controlled by a single party, cluster of local patricians or just a single family.

Read this extraordinary OECD profile. Argentina is one of the most decentralized countries in the world. Provinces seem to have a constitutional right to borrow up to 25% of their income (most of which comes from their share of federal tax receipts) per year from the federal government. It would be as if US states could unilaterally require the federal reserve to print money for them on an ongoing basis, without Washington being able to do much about it. The federal government collects something like 85% of tax income, but then distributes in practice well over the appropriate share of it to the provinces through this weird arrangement and must pay for all spending at the federal level on the military, infrastructure, etc.

In theory the federal congress can take over provincial government to rein in spending in an emergency, but in practice local power centers are themselves so populist and so entrenched that this is widely seen as impossible, and whenever a federal politician tries to bring the provinces to heel, the provincial elites get scared their powerful patronage networks will go unfunded and so replace the leader with someone more amenable.

If you look at spending patterns every time there’s a remotely non-terrible year in Argentina spending jumps 10-15% in real terms. Like the friend whose money seems to run through his fingers, they can’t not spend everything they have, and more. And of course the provincial system creates perverse incentives where each province has to maximize its bennies before the whole thing goes kaput again.

When the center right Juntos por el Cambio took power they inherited high inflation and pledged to address it, but action ended up being mangled by an internal struggle between the Central Bank of Argentina and the Treasury. The CBA wanted to more agresively target inflation but the Treasury pointed out because the pension system had a lag adjustment, disinflation would prevent them from getting their finances in the black. Fighting inflation and restoring the nation's fiscal health were both campaign promises of Macri's; unfortunately he sided with the Treasury and they raised the inflation target from 10% to 15%. International investors responded in kind to the poor financial stewardship and things have continued to spiral from there

The current peronist government, Frente de Todos, is actually addressing inflation with really high interest rates of 97%, at least in theory, but they're probably implementing it poorly. Whereas a normal Central Bank would be doing open market operations the CBA doesn't have the reserves for that, so historically they do sterilization instead, or selling bonds to remove money from the economy. The drawback is that issuing bonds is creating a debt that needs to be repaid, so it's a way of signaling that you're putting more money into the economy later, which might raise inflation expectations.

Part of the problem is that the normal psychological effect of performative monetary tightening, which is what’s primarily responsible for changes in expectation in normal countries, doesn’t exist around Argentinian central bank rate-setting, since nobody has faith that any tightening regime will be completed before enough people start whining for the populists to get back into power and turn on the taps.

Argentina is a hilarious country. Basically a bunch of retired college educated 30 year olds who live at home in poverty. It’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen. A mansion cost a millions dollars to own and $700/mth to rent. (Too many people buy real estate to hedge inflation but everyone lives with their family so there’s no renter demand so rent is dirt cheap to rent the upper classes investment mansions).

Steak cost 10% of the cost in the USA but clothes cost 150%. It’s literally so weird. The whole thing is weird. Way too many oddball terrifies and taxes on certain things that throw parts of the economy off.

Beautiful place though. And nice people too. Argentinians are some of the nicest people out there.

Plan to move there sooner or later.

I think it’s one of those countries where material quality of life is much worse than in the rich world for the average person, but still high enough (plus mild climate, relaxed culture, relative safety) that most people are kind of fine with the arrangement.

The best comparison really is Southern Italy, which Southern Italians will always tell you is a shithole (and it kind of is) but at the same time don’t want to leave because compared to working hard 9-6 in Milan for (much) more money, staying in Calabria and living a chill life is preferable to them.

I mean some of that is surely PPP terms combining oddly with subsidies.

Agreed. I have a kind of not-that-backed-up theory that all the previous, mismanaged crises Argentina has lived through have had a lasting psychological effect that makes it harder to restore balance. Like if a normal country has a rocky weather in the economy people don't necessarily all react in some extreme fashion, whereas Argentinians have good reason to expect their leaders to respond poorly and for things to escalate, so they'll rapidly shift purchasing habits or pull money from banks and help make their fears a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Dollarization is usually a bad (long term) solution to a currency crisis, but in Argentina’s case is likely worth it, simply as a way to force powerful provincial governments into restraining spending.

I think it could have been a good idea if they had done it a long time ago, or maybe just stuck through with convertibility. As is even Millei thinks they’d have to liquidate 100% of reserves to pull it off, and everyone else seems to think even that wouldn’t be enough.

That’s a problem, but a bigger problem is that the current situation serves a lot of Argentinian elites just fine (it’s not like they - or anyone - have their savings in pesos, which is part of the problem), so there’s little impetus for change, ever.

Not sure where these stats are from, but if the real figures are similar, the reality (as with much of South America) is that the rich have it too good to upend the system.

Those are pretty bonkers levels of inequality, but I think it sort of drives from the opposite direction given the polls showing 60% of people opposing dollarization. The elites could weather a major change well enough, but they probably won’t dollarize precisely because the cash-strapped public doesn’t want their pensions going up in smoke

I also wouldn’t rule out reforms from the top, though they probably won’t be that dramatic. The previous Administration did some pretty wide ranging (if poorly implemented) reforms and I’d guess they’re going to win this election too.

the cash-strapped public doesn’t want their pensions going up in smoke

What do you mean by this?

I tried to access the Bloomberg link that mentions the poll (with 12ft.io too) but no luck.

I'd guess only a small percentage of the population would oppose the dollarization due to fear whilst saving money in that currency.

Interestingly, the article you linked about sterilization is written by Cachanosky one of the authors of the now main plan of dollarization for Milei to implement, if elected.

Argentina has insane dollar savings rates. Half the middle class has $100k+ in cash sitting around somewhere. That makes the case for dollarization perhaps uniquely interesting vs other attempts to do it in Cambodia, Zimbabwe etc.

What do you mean by this?

The rosiest perspective on dollarization is Millei’s and he thinks it would take 100% of reserves to buy up all the pesos in circulation. Everyone else seems to think Argentina’s reserves are less than the monetary base which if they can't secure a huge loan could force a pretty severe devaluation and wipe out savings.

Additionally, Argentina pays for their deficits by printing money and would lose the ability to do that after dollarization, so they'd assuredly have to cut public spending. The current Minister of Economy promised to stop doing this over a year ago but certainly has not. Social Security expenditures are close to half of their spending (including pensions and unemployment insurance) and is supposed to be funded by the Sustainability Guarantee Fund, but in 2008 the government nationalized the fund and started using it as a patronage vehicle: "President Cristina Fernandez’s government has used ANSES [State Pension Agency] to fund everything from laptops for schoolchildren to the Treasury itself after she nationalized the pension system....By relying on the ANSES, the government has been able to keep spending on politically popular but costly programs."

After a decade and a half of diverting funds to low-return government securities and subsidized infrastructure projects the SGF is now thoroughly depleted and ranked 3rd from the bottom of 44 countries in the Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index, leaving pension funding leaning heavily on monetary financing and likely first on the chopping block if they lose this ability. Long term it's assuredly better to restrain monetary financing but short term it would be pretty painful.

I tried to access the Bloomberg link that mentions the poll (with 12ft.io too) but no luck.

The article is mostly about dollarization itself, there isn’t a ton more detail about the polling beyond the headline:

A book Ocampo [the architect of Millei’s plan] wrote on dollarization sold out in Buenos Aires bookstores last year. But the broader public is skeptical. Two recent polls that each surveyed about 1,000 Argentines showed that more than 60% oppose dollarization. “The dollar is an object of desire in Argentina, but most Argentines don’t know what dollarization is nor understand how it can affect the local economy,” says Gustavo Córdoba, director of polling company Zuban Córdoba y Asociados.

Zuban Córdoba y Asociados say the results are a preview from a national household survey, so no clue about the methods or anything.

Interestingly, the article you linked about sterilization is written by Cachanosky one of the authors of the now main plan of dollarization for Milei to implement, if elected.

Good catch

All else aside, it is absolutely breathtaking that the mainstream position circa May 2020 was that lab leak was a "racist conspiracy" and that "they have super sketchy meat markets, really dirty people spreading all sorts of diseases" was the thing that decent people believed.

If a singular person (small group of people) is revealed to have been responsible for all the death, of all the suffering, of all the economic disruption and all the curtailment of simple human livelihood that resulted from Covid 19 and the associated panic, what crime can you charge them with?

I still think the worst crimes were the government responses rather than the actual disease. Yes, someone screwing up with a highly contagious virus and then covering it up is a Bad Thing, but I can still figure out why someone acting basically rationally would do that. The insane suite of policies that accomplished absolutely nothing other than economic ruin and political chaos on the other hand... well, it's still not fully legible to me how we wound up there. I would prefer to start with punishment for the policymakers than the scientists.

I will always think of the places where liqour stores were essential business, but churches and religious services were not.

If only that was the worst... We had places where somebody bathing alone in the sea was arrested, but healthy seniors were forcefully housed with sick people, essentially sentencing them for horrible death. And literally nobody bore any responsibility for that, or even apologized for any of that.

In theory the lockdowns made sense to me.

But when I saw that aspect of it starting to form, I realized how much of a shitshow it was going to be.

Alcohol withdrawal can kill you. Forcing liquor stores to close would've put more stress on hospitals at a time when they were predicting overflow (remember all the temp hospitals, etc).

I definitely agree some churches were treated very unfairly but liquor stores is a poor comparison.

At least in CA, few liquor-licensed businesses sell only alcohol - there's just not enough clientele. The vast majority are restaurants, convenience stores, or groceries. Particularly with regard to off-sale-only licenses, there's no distinction between "bottle shop that only sells wine" and "Safeway that has a wine aisle in addition to 30k sq. ft. of groceries. It would have been legally difficult to make distinctions on the basis of "if business sells alcohol, then not essential" without also impinging food-sellers (particularly given the lazy & wooden ways that alcohol law is enforce in the state to begin with).

It’s nice when society’s priorities match mine.

There's some reason to think scientists involved would have known that their gain of function research was being done in a way that intentionally loopholed restrictions against doing so. And, if a lab leak is indeed the cause, then many of them have also participated in efforts to cover it up. Any prosecutions should focus on these rather than, say, the level of safety procedures in the lab, because intentional malice is a greater concern than mere human error or inadequate consideration of risk.

Yeah, if the US government knew about the lab leak, covering that up might have been the smart thing to do in 2020.

what many of us suspected on day 1, but was labeled as misinformation by major social networks.

If a singular person (small group of people) is revealed to have been responsible for all the death,

The real responsibility needs to fall on the CDC and the US for funding gain of function research. Fauchi and everyone in the chain of command who signed up on this on the US and China side needs to take the hit. Further both countries need to take the blame for this, not just some proximal staff on the ground.

If the West was anything close to what it imagines itself as, they should be tried for crimes against humanity. I mean at least have some fall guys condemned to 10 years in a labor camp or something.

How is it that the Soviet Union of all places is more capable of rendering justice about its own crimes than we are?

I think the latest official doctrine is "We will never know where Covid came from, there are various theories but none of them has any definite proof, it's just one of the mysteries of life and we shouldn't dwell on it too much. What difference, at this point, does it make?". This position is very resistant to any facts (you can always repeat "yes, it supports one of the theories, so what? there are many others, we'll never know" on loop) and precludes any accountability assigned to anyone. Mistakes maybe were made, but nobody knows anything for sure, so let's just all move on.

Seems likely the US was/is performing similar research itself (and broadly approves of GOF research anyway) so “calling out China” would have been unproductive and, even if a win from a nationalist perspective, would undoubtedly also draw worldwide attention to the great dangers involved in that whole space.

Better for everyone involved in GOF research that people believe it evolved naturally.

Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?

Traditionally in history, being torn apart by a mob.

What’s your issue with Yglesias?

Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?

Recklessness and negligence (foreseeably) leading to megadeaths should result in people being tortured for the rest of their lives.

This is basically what happened to people at Guantanamo Bay or certain prisons in Iraq, where the prisoner's crimes were much, much, much less serious.

Have a quick skim through the wikipedia page of what happened there. 'Forced injections' and 'being locked in confined cells' are karmically appropriate but those are just the beginning. Beatings, sleep deprivation, being chained in the foetal position for 24 hours and forced to soil oneself...

If the US tortured Afghans semi-randomly (per Rumsfields complaints about Guantanamo being misused "We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants... GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.") then it is appropriate to torture vastly more damaging people.

You're not really making a coherent argument here, but I guess writing some torture porn for yourself was the point of this comment.

Edit: "If [thing no one thinks was justified] was justified, then [this other horrible thing that I am describing in lascivious detail] is justified too!"

You should tell that to the US government. They clearly do think it was justified since they went and did it and refused to punish anyone for it.

leading to megadeaths should result in people being tortured for the rest of their lives.

I'm down for public executions. Preferably using a nuke or large quantities of TNT. Actually public executions will be way more acceptable than torture. And not one of those bullshit injection executions either. It needs to be grand, it needs to be awe inspiring, it needs to freeze the blood of onlookers at the final moment.

I read that article and I'm not clear on what they're claiming is the new information. The Wuhan lab for studying coronaviruses was studying coronaviruses isn't news; of course they were working with SARS-CoV-1-like viruses and how to make vaccines for them, that's their job. Nor is the fact that China actively covered up any research into the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

The article makes no attempt to engage with the evidence for the market hypothesis (link is to a podcast discussing the papers, but there's also links to the papers): (1) the market is epicenter of the early cases and (2) there were two separate introductions to the market weeks apart of two separate lineages of SARS-CoV-2. It's certainly possible that SARS-CoV-2 was twice introduced to the market and nowhere else via two separate lab leaks that coincidentally happened near the specific stalls where the animals hypothesized to be most likely the source of a spillover were sold (maybe someone at the lab sold an infected animal to someone who then sold it at the market? Maybe the market is just the busiest place the accidentally infected people from the lab went, and they quickly realized they should isolate so the market spread swamped any other spread, and the position within the market was coincidence?), but that requires more evidence than "look over there: scary virus lab with military funding".

And, as I've mentioned before on this topic, China desperately wants the cause of the pandemic to be anything but a market spillover because the market hypothesis puts the blame squarely on China for stopping enforcement of the post-SARS measures they had in place to prevent exactly that from happening.

What is the anti-molecular biology wing of the Motte? Genuinely confused here.

**Actual science, not the sort of science "represented" by Fauci.

At least the proximal origins paper seems to finally be falling out of favour, about 3 years and 3 months after Fauci appeared to have laundered it through proxies.

the market is epicenter of the early cases

This shows spread occurred at the market; it does not show the disease originated there. If you look at the early cases it looks rather like a population map, which is not surprising.

there were two separate introductions to the market weeks apart of two separate lineages of SARS-CoV-2.

Even if true, this is not evidence which distinguishes a lab leak from a market event. I see no reason to believe that "two lab leaks" is less likely than "two separate natural zoonotic events at the market".

And, as I've mentioned before on this topic, China desperately wants the cause of the pandemic to be anything but a market spillover because the market hypothesis puts the blame squarely on China for stopping enforcement of the post-SARS measures they had in place to prevent exactly that from happening.

This is ridiculous. A leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology puts even greater blame squarely on China. There is no way they prefer a lab leak hypothesis (at least not a leak from a Chinese lab; they already tried to blame the US Army) to a market hypothesis.

Even if true, this is not evidence which distinguishes a lab leak from a market event. I see no reason to believe that "two lab leaks" is less likely than "two separate natural zoonotic events at the market".

If I’m understanding @token_progressive’s point correctly, shouldn’t we expect “two separate lab leaks that spread directly to the same market” to be less likely than “two separate natural zoonotic events at the market”.

The latter only encodes information regarding origin, while former encodes information regarding origin and spread.

As we add more stipulations, the probability must fall, no?

If I’m understanding @token_progressive’s point correctly, shouldn’t we expect “two separate lab leaks that spread directly to the same market” to be less likely than “two separate natural zoonotic events at the market”.

I don't see why. We don't know any of the probabilities involved. Most particularly we do not know that the "probability of two separate natural zoonotic events" is less than or equal to the "probability of two lab-created zoonotic events".

I don't see why.

Then I recommend following up on the sources I linked. I am not a scientist with expertise in this area; I am just doing my best to link to them and summarize their arguments.

(2) there were two separate introductions to the market weeks apart of two separate lineages of SARS-CoV-2.

Doesn't this make the argument that the outbreak started with a spillover from animals at the market much less likely rather than more? That there was a distribution of covid within wild animals that split into two lineages before being transferred to humans? Fine enough. That both those lineages happened to transfer over to humans at the same place a few weeks apart, instead of literally anywhere else in the country? That seems spectacularly improbable. A far simpler hypothesis for why this could happen is that both lineages were circling in humans prior to the market and that the market being the epicentre is what caused the detection of the second at the market too. It also makes the lab leak hypothesis more likely, as a lab leak being repeated due to the same undetected problem with safety causing two distinct leaks is more probable than two outbreaks starting in close proximity by sheer random chance.

The reasoning for that supporting the market hypothesis is that it suggests the virus was spreading among animals within a farm that sold its animals to the market. It's exactly what you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to look like. But it could also be explained by other theories, for instance the lab repeatedly selling infected animals to the market.

A far simpler hypothesis for why this could happen is that both lineages were circling in humans prior to the market

That's not supported by the data. In order for this to be true, either (1) the data has been manipulated to omit cases not linked to the market, (2) all of those humans were closely linked to the market, or (3) all of those humans were very careful (or coincidentally happened to) not spread the virus except at the market.

And, as I've mentioned before on this topic, China desperately wants the cause of the pandemic to be anything but a market spillover because the market hypothesis puts the blame squarely on China for stopping enforcement of the post-SARS measures they had in place to prevent exactly that from happening.

anything?


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