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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   33043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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Remember "creeping Sharia Law" that far-right hysterics were warning about 10-15 years ago? Of course it was always ridiculous, but now something pretty amusing has happened.

‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

What stood out to me was the support of right-wing activists from nearby towns. So this isn't just a moslem issue, even white Republicans are joined up. Here in Europe, populists like Geert Wilders were often warning about how too many moslem immigrants would threaten liberal values but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.

For liberals it also creates a bizarre spectacle. They've been obsessed with white Christian "fascists" and often turned a blind eye towards immigrants. Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.

Another ironic twist is that the supposed "Great Replacement myth" is largely what facilitated this change. Moslems are now a clear supermajority in the city and the change happened relatively quickly. Liberals were demographically replaced by the people they brought in and now feel like they've been hosed. Can't feel much sympathy for those who use immigration as a political weapon against their domestic political enemies.

They actually didn't "ban Pride flags"; they banned flags of any race, religion, sexual orientation or political affiliation being flown on government property. If anything, the conservative Muslims of Hamtramck are taking a stand for classical liberalism by only allowing the stars-and-stripes on government buildings (and presumably the flags of the city and state). I don't think this would have been controversial even 10 years, and certainly not 20 years ago. The only totalizing religion at work here is homosexuality - the old refrain of "but how does it affect you?" rings very hollow when the faithful are demanding public displays of obeisance.

If anything, the conservative Muslims of Hamtramck are taking a stand for classical liberalism by only allowing the stars-and-stripes on government buildings (and presumably the flags of the city and state).

If we went back to that everywhere, I'd accept it. No religion flags, no Pride flags, no "this is International Cat Grooming Day" flags, just the national flag on government buildings and you can fly whatever damn flag you like from your own house. Yeah, even the Confederate flag, go for it. Maybe the Nazi version of the swastika would be pushing it, keep that one indoors boys.

The 'not compulsory only it is' Rainbow Flags everywhere for June annoys me mainly because nobody else would get the same treatment. Though I am starting to laugh at the iterations of Progress Pride etc. because each new version is more crowded and uglier than the last one. I have no idea where they're going to shove the Furry Pride emblems on the design when we get to that point.

Good God, that's ugly. What happened to all that gloating that being gay/queer was so superior to boring old vanilla cishets, because queerness was fashion and glamour and creativity and art?

It's like taking drugs - sure, some drugs can inspire creative breakthroughs, if you also do a lot of creative work. But if all you do is taking drugs and looking for drugs and talk about which drugs to take - there would be no creativity coming out there. I think you need a solid foundation and maybe a little crazy to make it not boring. But if you have 100% crazy and none of the foundation - then it's just chaos.

Not only is it public obedience, but it’s public obedience that is inherently interesting for children, as they have a natural interest in colorful things and unique identity marks that give social reinforcement. It is certainly making some percentage points of the children gay, the only question is what percent.

To what degree it is currently de rigueur to accept as self-evident that homosexuality is innate is unclear to me, but if we believe Lady Gaga (and why wouldn't we?) it is. On the other side we have voices suggesting gayness, like sexual paraphilia (and I sometimes wonder if this term is even used any more or is seen as 'intolerant,') is a product of formative experiences in childhood (I've read for example Camille Paglia making this claim.) I am so far not compelled by the arguments of either side, particularly as often neither side makes arguments beyond that that their conclusions are obvious and to question them is at best silly (see the wry cartoons of a person beibg asked "When did you realize you were straight?") and at worst evidence of some serious character flaw/maliciousness in the questioner.

In my thinking here both views are now hopelessly mired (at least in the US) in politics, and while I am not as dogmatic as some in insisiting that social science is all garbage, I also have eyes to see, and yes, much of it (and much of psychology) to me seems to intellectually bear rotten fruit.

Having thumbed all that out, I think personally that even if we are to passively accept that a fetish might indeed be born of and from childhood circumstances, one would have to assume such circumstances were at least in some may imaginatively sensual--insert any evocative image from your own childhood as illustration. Even then, though, we are assuming, playing with self-report and reconstruction of motive, without the kind of empirical verification one might demand in other circumstances. But let'w say we accept it anyway. It still seems a jump, as ＠Gdanning suggests, that pride flags and a general ethos of gayness will produce spontaneously in boys a desire to fellate members of their peeergroup. It might make these same boys less traditionally masculine, sure (though I have my doubts how much influence Miss Bardwell pinning Pride flags on bulletin boards or organizing Pride summits or whatever will have on the realities of the locker room). It might make them more accepting of gayness as a norm, which is arguably very much a good thing.

There seems, in your post, to be a kind of knee-jerk reaction happening--I mean my knee jerks as much as the next person and it's true I am not really exposed to this kind of Pridemania where I am. But suggesting that it all is going to cause an uptick in gayness I believe requires a bit more rigor than you seem to be applying.

Ancient Greek and Rome had perhaps 90% of men engaging in sex with young men. This seems high to me, but I must accept that there have been substantial genetic changes in humanity since that time or 90% of men would engage in homosexual acts if society told them it was normal.

There were extensive incursions of Germanic tribes that did not routinely engage in homosexual sodomy, but gene analysis does not support enough of a change to suggest that the behavioral difference is genetic. At least, that is my understanding.

Ovid was out of step with Roman society, and Juvenal, Martial, Stabo, and Lucian, in suggesting that sex with women was superior. It seems that most Roman men, perhaps almost all, preferred to have sex with teen boys rather than women.

It seems that Roman homosexuality came from Greek influence in the second century BC. I think this strongly suggests that homosexuality can be culturally nurtured. I wonder what the upper limit it. In Ancient Rome and Greece it seemed remarkably high. I wonder if there is a more modern society where more than 50% of men engage in gay sex? Perhaps Arab societies?

I find this weird, but I suppose it is just as strange as realizing that I would be a pious Muslim or enjoy eating fermented herring should I have been born in different circumstances.

Ancient Greek and Rome had perhaps 90% of men engaging in sex with young men.

X

More specifically, keeping an adolescent femboy slave was a high status aristocratic thing, but the Roman elite seemed to think it a little strange to actually prefer screwing him over women. The emperor Hadrian, among others, faced mockery for actually preferring his young male lover.

Now in Greece things are more complicated, but the broader picture is still one where this was an elite pursuit- specifically a standard elite induction ritual was to enter into a relationship with an older man as a teen. This is documented from both Athens and Sparta, and the elite male practitioners generally deny that the purpose was sexual gratification and claim that penetrative sex with them was taboo- although they engage in a suspiciously large amount of aesthetic appreciation for nude adolescent males. Athens is better documented than Sparta(which in turn is better documented than other city states), and denial of having engaged in sexual acts with one’s mentor as a youth happens with a frequency there that suggests it happened but wasn’t universal.

Additionally, the gender ratios of infanticide victims outside of ancient brothels skews very male(whereas infanticide in the ancient world more generally skewed female due to preference for sons), indicating that the brothel visiting public(which would have been a very large percentage of the population; visiting brothels was the standard unmarried male sexual behavior and not stigmatized) preferred women, not adolescent boys.

In conclusion, the ancient femboy thing looks and probably was an elite signaling game and not rooted in widespread homosexual inclinations. Instead the Greek and Roman elite mostly had sex with women while showing their urbanity and sophistication by talking about wanting to sleep with teenaged boys, who in turn mostly had sex with female prostitutes and not adult men.

More specifically, keeping an adolescent femboy slave was a high status aristocratic thing

It seems that it was common in the top 10% of society. That is a lot of people. If the top 10% of society can be convinced to engage in gay sex then I think we are all rather malleable in this regard.

the Roman elite seemed to think it a little strange to actually prefer screwing him over women.

This is not the case, according to Wikipedia. In fact, the opposite is true, and it was weird to prefer women.

By the end of the Augustan period Ovid, Rome's leading literary figure, was alone among Roman figures in proposing a radically new agenda focused on love between men and women: making love with a woman is more enjoyable, he says, because unlike the forms of same-sex behavior permissible within Roman culture, the pleasure is mutual.

Several other Roman writers, however, expressed a bias in favor of males when sex or companionship with males and females were compared, including Juvenal, Lucian, Strato, and the poet Martial, who often derided women as sexual partners and celebrated the charms of pueri.

Perhaps poets were more gay than other people?

the ancient femboy thing looks and probably was an elite signaling game and not rooted in widespread homosexual inclinations.

If most people in the elite are willing to have sex with boys, then that is surprising and suggests that modern-day signaling could achieve as much.

How do we have accurate records of infanticide? That seems a rather weird place to start when we have lots of literature on the practice of concubines. Sources agree that female prostitution was more common. Perhaps this was because there were fewer other jobs for women. Perhaps the common man was less easily swayed. Who knows.

Additionally, the gender ratios of infanticide victims outside of ancient brothels skews very male(whereas infanticide in the ancient world more generally skewed female due to preference for sons), indicating that the brothel visiting public(which would have been a very large percentage of the population; visiting brothels was the standard unmarried male sexual behavior and not stigmatized) preferred women, not adolescent boys.

What’s the argument here? That prostitutes disproportionately killed their male children because they knew that at least the girls could grow up to become prostitutes? Seems spurious to me.

That the owners of prostitutes disproportionately killed the male children of their enslaved workers because they expected to put the female children to work in just over a decade, but anticipated lower demand for males

This brings up the question of whether the homosexual acts of any given man make that man 'gay' or are just men sticking it in holes, in particular if he is having sexy times with his wife/wives/concubines in addition to his catamite or whoever. One of Paglia's points is that the decadence signalled by a societal preoccupation with non-heterosexual sex (in particular transgenderism) heralds that same society's imminent collapse. All very interesting but Paglia, brilliant as she is in my mind, is still outside her wheelhouse on such matters. Still this speaks to your point about an upper limit.

This brings up the question of whether the homosexual acts of any given man make that man 'gay' or are just men sticking it in holes,

Perhaps I am guilty of having a missing mood, or other people are, but my understanding is that most men in Western society would not enjoy having anal sex with a teen boy. I think gay men are sometimes confused by this, and presume that every one would actually enjoy that, but just have hangups that make them feel guilty about doing it.

I think (some) gay men could better understand this if they compared it to having sex with mature women. I know lots of gay men who would shudder at the thought of that, but might be able to screw a sufficiently thin young girl. Some straight men are not lying about not being turned on, and actually being turned off, by male bodies. That said, the Roman numbers might suggest that this group of straight men is a very small sexual minority.

men sticking it in holes, in particular if he is having sexy times with his wife/wives/concubines in addition to his catamite or whoever.

If you can afford a sex slave, and choose a male one, you might just be a little gay.

Oh I agree. But recall that scene in Portnoy's Complaint about thr kid so horny (for lack of a better term) that he gratified himself with the raw liver he had been sent to collect for the dinner. And I would suggest innumerable couch cushions, discarded socks, and, to use the vulgar term, pocket pussies (I will spare you the oddly mainstream acceptance these have in Japan...and you are free to not click that link) to say nothing of unsuspecting sheep and calves in more farming cultures could all, had they but a voice to cry out with, attest to the lack of self-discipline when it comes to the male sex drive. We won't even discuss smaller, more delicate-looking incarcerated males.

Don't get me wrong. I have never, in memory, had a gay inclination. But it's a crazy world.

I suspect part of homosexual behaviour among men are simply power plays - speaking to your oblique prison rape reference. Is that necessarily an urge born of lust for someone's body... or the desire to degrade them in a show of social domination? The same argument could conceivably be made in terms of the "mentor-youth" relationships in the ancient world. Perhaps it was a way for older men to assert dominance over younger and unruly pupils, or for eager pupils to submit in totality to their masters. Disentangling sex from psychology isn't always straightforward.

Nevertheless, we have more permissive attitudes than ever towards homosexuals in the West and it doesn't appear that most men find it gratifying, given how the overwhelming majority still pursue and bed women. This makes me question claims that homosexuality was widespread in ancient Greece and Rome. Perhaps homosexuals have a tendency to wildly inflate the amount of men who have such inclinations, whether in the past or in the contemporary age.

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So, you think displaying a rainbow flag causes some pct of boys to grow up to get an erection when seeing a naked guy, and to fail to get an erection when seeing a naked woman?

I’m positive that in the formative years where their sexualities and preferences and philias develop (remember it’s not unusual for people to have fetishes they trace to childhood), that these things are causing some percentage of boys to become gay:

  • Having special days where you show only the positive role models of gays, no evil members, and no positive straight members, which artificially increases gay positive valence

  • Having a colorful flag for gays and no colors and no flag for straight people. For children, color = objectively better. Color is an objective “attractive marker”

  • Giving special esteem, attention, and “interesting points” to gays

I note that this is very different from your original claim, which was specifically about the rainbow flag. But regardless, the things you list are going to change what causes them to become sexually aroused, and what doesn't? That seems quite unlikely.

I’m expanding on my comment because you asked a question, and in any case the rainbow flag is a symbol of the whole LGBT enterprise. The question is whether childhood experiences and culture can influence sexuality. There’s evidence that it does:

  • gays are more likely to have been molested in childhood

  • boys like the bachi bazi culture in Afghanistan, who are picked regardless of orientation in childhood, grow up to be gay: According to Khan et al. (2009, p. 24), bacha bereesh appear to predominately “grow up to follow a sexually active pattern as receptive males, self-identifying with their femininity and receptive role” as a “third gender” within a trinary gender system of man/woman/non-man

  • it’s common knowledge that childhood experiences can result in lifelong philias, whether this be the appearance of a mate or a sexual activity

So, IMO, it is established that childhood sexual experiences mold adult orientation. The remaining question is whether reinforcement of sexuality in childhood molds adult orientation. This needs to be studied, but I am positive that it does to some degree, because that makes sense based on what we know about reinforcement.

I’m expanding on my comment because you asked a question

Right. You made a comment specifically about the flag, and I asked a comment about the flag, but you chose to respond about something else.

There is a huge difference between having sexual experiences during childhood, or even having sexuality being reinforced, and seeing displays of gay pride flags.

Right. You made a comment specifically about the flag, and I asked a comment about the flag, but you chose to respond about something else.

There is a huge difference between having sexual experiences during childhood, or even having sexuality being reinforced, and seeing displays of gay pride flags.

Five years ago, before this topic was as heavily discussed in the culture, I took my then-14yo daughter to a concert. Each of the two opening acts and the main act did a "gay" song that involved the waving of rainbow flags, and the 25,000 14 year olds in the arena went apeshit each time. The energy in that place during the rainbow parades was off the chart.

Kids are very susceptible to fads (I myself wore a "Frankie Say Relax" t-shirt in junior high having no idea of its connotations...) and peer pressure. Whether or not the Rainbow flag actually turns kids gay is separate from the idea that this kind of mass celebration reinforces ideas of what is "good," and there probably isn't a wide distance between a kid feeling encouraged to try gay over their innate disgust tendencies, and then forming intimate bonds following experimental gay contact, especially if it's a first sexual experience. If you close your eyes and try real hard to think about how rainbow flags make you special, a mouth is just a mouth, as David Rabe wrote. And maybe there's no looking back after that point.

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No, see:

as they have a natural interest in colorful things and unique identity marks that give social reinforcement

Re:

There is a huge difference

But therein lies the rub. It’s not a huge difference at all. It’s a little difference. The difference between being molested by a gay man physically, and being put through a gauntlet of pro-homosexuality propaganda, is not actually different from the standpoint of “how reinforcement works psychologically”. If I watch Alizee’s performance of J’en ai marre as a boy I may become hopelessly infatuated with dancing French brunettes, for no other reason than an association was placed in my mind. This happens all the time: associations predicated on reinforcement.

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I don't think it's the flags, small kids aren't going to know what that is all about. It's the teachers pushing it in school and yes I do mean pushing it. Like this loser.

That seems like a very odd example of anyone pushing anything. It is 15 seconds long, and in it's entirety the guy says, "In school I was bullied for being gay, even by my teachers. So I became a teacher. Guess who my favorite students are [rainbow flag]." I am pretty good at steelmanning, but I am struggling to understand how someone would consider that pushing homosexuality, nor why anyone would describe him as a "loser."

nor why anyone would describe him as a "loser."

"Once upon a time, I was discriminated against. I now practice that discrimination against others and am proud to be doing so."

Rejoicing in intentionally being part of the problem rather than part of the solution leads me to believe that person is a substandard human being. It's not much more complex than that.

Where does he say he is discriminating against others?

I don't discriminate against black students, it's just that the white ones are my favorite!

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To steelman his point, I'd say it would be a lot more like identifying as 'queer', or some other nebulous label that doesn't actually equate to a change in sexuality.

I think perhaps that is stretching steelmanning a bit far. That is not usually what people mean by "becoming gay." Especially those who worry about kids "becoming gay."

It's pretty obviously true, there's a marginal bisexual boy who if market forces make being gay difficult might just marry a woman and never really think about men that hard; who finds out it's an opportunity be can take and sexual market forces lead him to be mainly gay.

The utilitarian question being, is that percentage more or less than the marginal really really gay guy who marries a woman and they're both miserable due to lack of awareness of alternatives.

Aren’t there something like 2x as many self reported bisexuals as exclusive homosexuals even among those who engage in same sex behavior?

I have no idea, and our general understanding of bisexuality strikes me as primarily misunderstanding sexual market forces.

But that is a claim about behavior. The original claim was about sexual arousal. in your hypothetical, the bisexual boy is bisexual before being exposed to the flag.

I don't think they can entirely be separated. The brain is the largest sex organ. Disgust reactions to many things are taught, as are arousal reactions, and can vary completely based on culture.

So, you think displaying a rainbow flag causes some pct of boys to grow up to get an election when seeing a naked guy

If that’s what it’s going to take in order to finally introduce the Vote Of No Confidence into the American political tradition, then by God, the young hetero men of this country are just going to have to grin and bear it. Show me as many naked guys as you must if it means we can get this new election started early.

And Eugene Volokh seems to think it applies only to flags flown on city flagpoles rather than a ban on people carrying the flag on city streets, in parks, etc (such a ban would almost certainly be unconstitutional).

If anything, the conservative Muslims of Hamtramck are taking a stand for classical liberalism by only allowing the stars-and-stripes on government buildings (and presumably the flags of the city and state).

Or they are just politically savvy enough to know that this is what they can get away with.

See, I have to wonder about this kind of thing. What other flag could they possibly have in mind that they wanted banned? The Nazi flag? Unlikely to be flown there. The Gadsen flag? Probably not very salient politically to Muslims.

I won't deny the possibility that this really is some "Pride is not for the government to approve or disapprove via flags" principle, but I think this ban has a good chance of having been crafted specifically with the intention to ban the Pride flag from being flown. I legitimately cannot think of another flag which many Americans know the meaning of on sight.

I legitimately cannot think of another flag which many Americans know the meaning of on sight.

Confederate, Ukrainian, BLM.

I’d say also China, UK, Canada as far as national flags go. Possibly Mexico.

Okay, that's fair. I think my overall point stands, however - they're not particularly worried about those flags.

Let's ask a different question: if it applies broadly, does it matter to you why it was passed?

It recontextualizes the event. "Muslims ban Pride flag from their city" is a tailor-made headline for those who are anti-LGBT and find it acceptable to support Muslims when, in many cases, they would have openly reviled the religion only few years ago. "Muslims ban all flags except US flag from being displayed on government buildings" gets far less traction.

Moreover, suppose other cities across the US start doing this - are we going to be talking about the wave of liberalism sweeping rural conservative towns, or are we going to talk about bigots emulating other bigots?

Death of the author at play- the actual motivations don't matter, and there could be multiple overlapping motivations anyways; what gets talked about is, as you point out, whatever gets traction and I would add satisfies the biases of the loudest people.

Why is this in any way good? I sincerely hope that people here, even if they are totally anti-LGBT, would correct the record if the more accurate interpretation is that this is an anti-Pride action. I expect I'll be disappointed, unfortunately.

Talking about bigots emulating bigots hinges on who gets to define bigots; Mottezans like to fuss a lot about progressive bigotry but that never really gets traction elsewhere. Or slightly more historically, "Democrats are the real racists" is pointing at a serious phenomenon, even moreso now than in its heyday, but never really 'worked' because the people saying it don't have the privilege of defining racist.

I think that if people here were to set aside their partisan politics, they would agree with me that it is bigotry to hate someone for that which they cannot control. The defenses of anti-LGBT sentiment I see here fall into 2 categories of justification, though I'm sure I've missed at least one:

  1. There is a controllable element to being LGBT i.e schools and media are encouraging kids to identify as gay.

  2. Pride and progressive activism are so tightly wrapped together that when someone waves the latest Pride flag, they're signaling their support of many non-related beliefs as well (more cynically, each Pride flag is being virtually planted to demonstrate areas of control)

In other words, no one is out here saying that progressive orthodoxy on the inherent nature of being LGBT+ is correct, but it is still okay to hate those people.

There is a more interesting argument to be had about the etiology of being not-straight or not-gender-conforming, but only because the people interested in discussing it tend to be less interested in describing the left as a Cordyceps.

Is "this" here meaning the flag restriction, or the death of the author "intent doesn't matter" part?

I didn't say the death of the author was good

The latter, and I'm sorry for implying you thought it was good. It seemed to me that you were trying to defend it as okay. Like, yeah, I get that it's inevitable, but it should not be tolerated here.

Would you be satisfied if someone tried to both/and it: this is almost certainly intended an anti-Pride action, but performed in a manner that is actually a healthier expression of liberalism?

I'm not certain that it is. The odds of another flag being flown on government buildings is slim. I suspect the Muslims of the city are not as upset if they see a flag for Ukraine. They might get more offended by a BLM flag, but I don't know.

Banning lots of things that won't happen anyways strikes me as irrelevant to any kind of redemption of the law itself.

It helps this position that Petes Thiel and Buttigieg get treated poorly for not toeing every line.

What are you referring to?

"here" being the Motte, yes? I'm pretty sure there's at least a couple conservatives and conservative Christians who might take that stance, though they might try to thread one of the needles like "having homosexual attraction is inherent; it's acting upon it that's disordered and bad."

I'm not certain the stance is exactly the same. My understanding of the religious conservative standpoint is that they think it's a test by God, whereas progressives are overwhelming secular in originating their arguments. But I grasp your point.

Is there anywhere anyone still has that argument? I do think it's interesting, but there's nowhere I know of it can be had where it wouldn't devolve into chaos. Maybe the schism, maybe, depending who shows up that's not one of the main regulars.

It was on the old subreddit once, brought up by naraburns, I believe.

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The future of American demographics has little to do with Muslims, Africans, Asians etc. It has everything to do with Central American migration.

The European situation and American situation with mass immigration are quite different. In Europe, the signs of mass immigration become more immediate flashpoints: regular terrorism both small and large scale, radicalization, various local-but-also-not phenomena, like the Kurdish, Turkish and Lebanese crime families in Germany, the radicalized banlieues in Belgium and France, the grooming gangs in the UK and Netherlands, the Mocro Mafia in the Dutch port cities, gun crime skyrocketing in Sweden etc.

In America, the endless stream of Central American migration is less ‘obvious’. Guatemalans and Salvadorans don’t have a religion deeply foreign to American shores, they dress largely the same as the rest of the white, black and native American underclass. They speak a different language, but this largely disappears by the second to third generation. The problems of mass immigration (crime, lower trust, lower productivity, general Brazilification) take longer to recognize, many members of the public don’t even think consciously about them at all.

This is probably why anti-immigrant movements find more fertile ground in Europe than in the US, even if they don’t succeed there either.

The general dialectic surrounding immigration into the US is almost always a sleight of hand argument that goes: 'At least they're not as bad as the blacks.' Usually accomplished by creating a category called 'Americans' and comparing it to a category called 'Immigrants'.

In a pound for pound comparison, there is nothing viscerally worse about arabs compared to Mexicans. The most notable thing with regards to foreigners is not the dress or religion. It's the color of their skin and the shape of their face. People notice their neighborhoods becoming less white. To that end most muslims in Europe that are out and about dress western. It's really only the women who make a statement with a headscarf and more modest dress. The more orthodox muslims don't exist to most people since they generally live in very muslim areas to begin with and are mostly out and about when the Europeans are at work.

The real reason America isn't throwing a bigger fit is that America has had the worst 'immigrant' group of any western country nagging and gnawing their way through a functioning society. I mean, just compare the alleged 'No Go Zones' of Sweden with any sufficiently black inner city in the US. There's simply no shock to the system possible.

The most notable thing with regards to foreigners is not the dress or religion. It's the color of their skin and the shape of their face. People notice their neighborhoods becoming less white.

The most notable thing, by far, is their language, assuming it isn't English or it's some obviously-foreign version of it. Next is likely behavior. Physical appearance is no better than third, unless we're talking pygmies or something.

I think honestly progressives are, on a global scale, not really as popular as they think they are and never have been. Anyone who’s read any sacred texts from an Abrahamic religion would have known that homosexuality is not allowed. This isn’t a surprise.

I think the point of connection between Muslims and Christian fascists (if we’re to use that term) or even Orthodox Judaism is that unlike the liberals and progressives and secular groups they take the religion seriously which really is the bone of contention in the USA where the progressive ideology is trying to overtake religion and create an essentially pagan religion in which various deities and religions are really all the same, and where what matters isn’t your gods but adherence to the cultus progressiva. And really, this is exactly the crisis that Rome faced with Jews in the last century BC and the first century AD. They refused the cultus, rejected the imposition of pagan ideas and symbols and mores. The Abrahamics especially the conservative ones have chosen their god over the imperial cultus progressivas and are greeted with hatred or at least disgust by the thought leadership.

cultus progressiva

That would be either cultus progressivus(progressive cult/devotion) or cultus progressivi(devotion to/cult of progress), depending on exactly what phrasing you’re going for. And Latin ‘cultus’ does not mean ‘cult, the creepy isolated weirdos’ it means ‘cult, the literal term referring to a religious devotion or sect’.

That’s kind of what I’m going for, as the nearly required acceptance of and celebration of LGBT do take on the tone of religion. It’s no longer enough to let others do as they please, you have to participate.

Well, it could also be declined, although that would be unusual in English, I believe.

Though apparently less unusual in Hamtramck.

Well, yes I'm enjoying the immediate hit of Schadenfreude (what, did you really think you could use white liberal guilt tactics on non-white people? did you think the finger-wagging about the horrible Christian fundamentalists would have a straw's worth of meaning to people who aren't Christian?)

But the wider implications aren't that rosy. On certain issues, the enemy of my enemy may be my friend, but that does not mean we have compatible values in the long run.

For liberals it also creates a bizarre spectacle. They've been obsessed with white Christian "fascists" and often turned a blind eye towards immigrants. Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.

I don't think this is why Muslims typically vote left. It seems to me that neither immigration policy or welfare policy are major motivators for the Muslims I've talked with.

The two big reasons why they tend to vote left is 1. they are frequently vehemently anti-Israel and 2. they don't like the overt hostility that gets directed their way from the right.

A GOP that managed to shut up about muslims, ran hard against LGBT stuff, and promised to cut aid to Israel would win the Muslim vote easily IMO.

It's pretty much entirely 2. Muslims were a republican demographic before the GWOT and the GOP doesn't, deep in its bones, care about Islam when not actually at war with it. Besides, it's not like democrats are anything less than ultra-pro-Israel.

Muslims were a somewhat Republican demographic before 2001 because there were very few of them and they were a largely well educated upper-middle class demographic, which used to be more Republican. Asians voted 42% for Bush in 2000 according to polling I just googled, in general before the WOT affluent minorities were more Republican since the culture war in the 1990s re. immigration was about illegal migration from Mexico, not skilled work visas.

The profile of American Muslims has changed substantially since 9/11 due to further large-scale immigration from Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Muslim parts of West and East Africa and the rest of MENA, making Muslim Americans more diverse in terms of wealth and background, and in any case affluent minorities in general (eg. East Asians, Indians) have turned against the GOP. After Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ proposal, even though it can be justified on grounds that aren’t strictly hostile or Islam as a religion, they’re unlikely to return to the Republicans any time soon.

Also, Muslims’ anti-Israel beliefs are different to anti-Israel reactionaries (who are in any case a tiny minority of conservatives). Conservative isolationists want the US to defund Israel and then leave the Middle East. This would not actually have much impact on the Palestinian situation (and might actually make things worse for them, it’s not as if Israel would collapse). By contrast, progressive and Muslim anti-Israel activists want more overt condemnation of the treatment of Palestinians, possible sanctions on Israel (eg. BDS) and so on. They want big state, big foreign policy, big intervention, just in the other direction.

The stats probably understate Muslim (and East and South Asian) income numbers because so many are students. The vast majority of Muslims near me are still in that middle-upper middle class demographic.

It's a funny reverse from my Euro family to my American family, "I don't get why Americans/Europeans are upset about Mexican/Muslim immigration, all the Mexicans/Muslims I know are smart professionals and small business owners, much more like 'us' than the Muslims/Mexicans WE have to deal with. I'd love to trade our immigrants for your immigrants."

There aren’t very many Mexicans in most of Europe at all. There are many Latin Americans (Brazilians in Portugal, Argentinians and Colombians and some Mexicans in Spain) in Iberia, but because of ancestral citizenship and visa costs they tend to precisely be the wealthier Iberian types. The average Brazilian who emigrates to Portugal is effectively Portuguese, they’re not indigenous amerindians from the Amazon or Afro-Brazilians from the poor north.

A Spaniard telling you Mexican immigrants seem to be nice is really just talking about his own countrymen, even if their ancestors spent 300 fruitless years in the New World before coming home.

There are many Latin Americans (Brazilians in Portugal)

There are a lot of Brazilians in Ireland too. The 2016 census showed 15,000 or so and now it's at 40,000.

Like the Polish before them (and unlike asylum seekers) there really isn't that much anti-migrant sentiment against them, though they do suffer a lot at the hands of Dublin's feral youths.

Also, in European contexts, a large portion of (Muslim) immigrants simply don't vote at all. If one checks a map showcasing voting rates in different electoral areas, frequently immigrant suburbs have very low rates. Of course a large portion of immigrants don't have citizenship in the first place, though in some places residency is enough to vote in local elections.

I'd wager that the ones who do vote will tend to be on the more integrated end of scale.

Doesn't seem accurate for the UK.

Nor for France: at least in 2022, there was a clear Muslim vote in favor of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party.

Muslims also disproportionately had many of the other predictors of support for Melenchon.

I doubt this. The fact is that the modern right's coalition does not cater to city folks and muslims aggregate in cities.

Don't you have cause and effect mixed up there? The modern right repels muslims and that is part of why they struggle in cities.

Not at all.

Muslim immigrants congregate in cities for the same reason almost all immigrants congregate in cities: They desire to soak up the spillover prosperity generated by the more productive persons in the city. It is very hard to live in a rural area and charge $40/hr to prune the hedges of a Google C-suite character. If you were to live in a rural area, that is a $7/hr job. You get the higher wage by accepting living conditions natives don't, such as 5 to a studio and the like.

What does that have to do with anything? I'm not disputing that Muslims live in cities, or arguing about why.

If I am not mistaken, there is a bit of a miscommunication going on. When you said:

The modern right repels muslims and that is part of why they struggle in cities.

I understood "they" to refer to the Right. I believe that anti_dan understood it to refer to Muslims.

Living in cities has both causes and effects and attractors.

If Muslims had to settle in places that need them, they wouldnt immigrate.

Sounds like the place which is willing to pay $40/hr for some hedge pruning needs people to do hedge pruning a lot more than the place which is only willing to pay $7/hr.

True, but the question we are asking is who gets that $40/hr not whether it is a filled job.

need

What do you mean by that? There’s a couple things getting conflated in this thread. Need them, economically, to fill unpleasant jobs? Politically, to win a socially conservative coalition?

I still fail to see your point.

Modern low skill immigrants go to places where they replace American workers for a slightly reduced wage, resulting in a zero sum game, as now those are just unemployed welfare receiving Americans. They do not (speaking in large % terms here) go found new cities in remote regions to exploit new resources.

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I could see it, but I’m not sure that shutting up is enough. Playing to the Christian fundamentalist crowd has been a vote part of the GOP platform for a while. Cutting out all mention of Islam or the Middle East, but still pushing for a generic Christianity in public spaces, would still be rather alienating.

This does make me wonder—how much of early 2000s evangelism was driven by the War on Terror? Teach the Controversy was developed in 2002, but appears to have its roots in late 80s court cases. No idea if it was deployed against a perceived Islamic influence. McReary v. ACLU was brought before 9/11. The complementary case, Van Orden v. Perry, involved a long-standing monument. I guess the war could have stirred up atheist sentiment, but judging by these court cases, it doesn’t appear to have galvanized evangelists.

Here in Europe, populists like Geert Wilders were often warning about how too many moslem immigrants would threaten liberal values but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.

I can think of no better term to encapsulate this phenomenon than the paradox of tolerance. Anyone who knows even a little bit about Islam can tell you that moslems aren't exactly friendly with gays, i.e. they are intolerant of the LGBT crowd. So what happens when you tolerate people who are intolerant of gays? You end up with the intolerance of gays, exactly as predicted.

Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.

And liberals mistake this for some sort of solidarity, when in reality, it's ludicrous to expect people with a vastly different culture and a vastly different set of values to ally with you. The only justification I've seen for why they would want to "join" them was that they were a minority in the same vein as blacks, trans people, etc. which is simply not how it works and has never worked that way.

I can think of no better term to encapsulate this phenomenon than the paradox of tolerance. Anyone who knows even a little bit about Islam can tell you that moslems aren't exactly friendly with gays, i.e. they are intolerant of the LGBT crowd. So what happens when you tolerate people who are intolerant of gays? You end up with the intolerance of gays, exactly as predicted.

Not this interpretation of the paradox of tolerance again!

For reference, the original Popperian paradox is more limited and much less explicitly progressively coded, and describes tolerance of people and ideas that refuse to be discussed.

The issue with the common misinterpretation is that it’s not much of a paradox at all.

Interesting, and not something I've considered before. Is there an article or blog post that I can link to the next time someone brings up the progressive misinterpretation of the paradox of tolerance?

Just the Wikipedia page on the paradox of tolerance suffices, which features a direct quote from Popper.

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

Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

It's fairly clear that Popper's original formulation of the paradox of tolerance was in large part about being intolerant of people who are themselves intolerant to open, rational debate and who are ready to win arguments using force. You cannot have things like free speech if you aren't willing to suppress people who would take it from others.

Now it has been warped into "Tolerant people accept all [attributes]. So people who express opinions which aren't accepting of all [attributes] need to be suppressed by any means necessary". And it should be noted that what constitutes "not accepting" under the progressive formulation of the term covers an absolutely massive scope. Belief in aggregate group differences that create differential outcomes, disbelief in progressive narratives of intergenerational guilt, and even opposition to actual race and sex discrimination promoted by the woke coalition are all categorised on a scale of intolerant to Literally Denying People's Right To Exist. At this point it covers practically every instance where someone disagrees with progressive talking points.

The hilarious part is that in Popper's original formulation of the paradox, the very people quoting him would be the "intolerant". They misuse Popper's paradox of tolerance to justify silencing the speech of their outgroup, and don't see how this makes them exactly the type of "intolerant" people Popper was talking about in his paradox.

Everyone else has given pretty good explanations of this. I’ll just quote an old comment of mine:

And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade.

I hate that that's an actual, real, example, and that it's an even better example of progressive "meme magic" than you seem to have laid out.

Consider the initial, Popperian formulation of the Paradox of Tolerance:

Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ... But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. ...

This is a milquetoast, classically liberal statement; tolerance in this sense is to literally tolerate other people, no matter how contrary to good taste (or hateful, or fascist, or communist...) they are. It is to tolerate dissent.

This has been morphed to something like:

A tolerant society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant individuals must not be tolerated.

It does not take any more than a cursory reading to appreciate that Popperian tolerance(1) and progressive tolerance(2) are essentially different words, and that the progressive version of the "paradox" in fact has no paradox in it, merely a word game where tolerance(2) is implicitly equated with tolerance(1).

(Consider:

A tolerant(2) society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant(2) individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant(2) individuals must not be tolerated(1).

If I did not make it clear.)

That the nonsensical lack-of-paradox "paradox" is now the mainstream interpretation is at once disheartening and also an excellent example of successful progressive "meme power" in the Dawkinsean sense of the word.

If you’re still confused, I’d add as an addendum that not all $ATTRIBUTES are reconcilable; as such, you’re really only putting a pretty name and trying to self-justify the privileging of certain things above others.

At the risk of being this guy, here’s Jessica Taylor’s explanation.

I recall that back in the New Atheist days some commentators would draw flak for pointing out that conservative Christians and Muslims agree on many social issues and could in theory form a united front against modern progressivism if they could overcome their differences. While in the US any alliances will at best be temporary and strategic, in Europe the demographic balance is more even and I could even see right-wing nationalists being assimilated by Islam rather than the other way around.

It's been a project of some European far rights for a while. Usually for reasons of a common antisemitism I will admit, but not always.

Some draw from Niezsche's appreciation for Islam, some from a common Abrahamic tradition. But these are all fringe movements without a united narrative.

I think a common sort of postmodern traditionalism could form a political coalition on these grounds, but the moment isn't ripe for it yet because people still think immigration can be curtailed and the largest excesses of wokism haven't hit as hard as America.

I mean we knew this was going to happen eventually. Realistically Muslims aren’t going to demographically replace whites in the US(although a few tiny towns somewhere might happen), and conservative whites know that.

Another ironic twist is that the supposed "Great Replacement myth" is largely what facilitated this change. Moslems are now a clear supermajority in the city and the change happened relatively quickly. Liberals were demographically replaced by the people they brought in and now feel like they've been hosed. Can't feel much sympathy for those who use immigration as a political weapon against their domestic political enemies.

Many liberals celebrated when Hamtramck, Michigan, elected a Muslim-majority council in 2015 but a vote to exclude LGBTQ+ flags from city property has soured relations

hmm... Muslims are still a reliable democratic voting bloc , with 70 percent voting for Biden in 2020 https://www.arabnews.com/node/1758536/world

Many blacks are culturally conservative but reliable democratic voters nonetheless. And for that, the alliance will not be broken even if there is disagreement among some on certain social issues.

I suspect the discontinuity between local and national is down to demographic weight. What percentage are moslems of America's population? A couple of percent? Given those odds, it stands to reason that they would do what they've traditionally done: vote for the white leftists who will give you money and your uncle back home a better chance at escaping his third world hellhole.

What this local election shows is revealed preference when unencumbered by demographic constraints; when making pragmatic alliances are no longer as crucial.

This is the exact kind of "gotcha" politics that I can't stand regardless of which side does it. What's the conservative takeaway supposed to be here? That we should restrict Muslim immigration because it's a threat to the LGBT agenda? Or that we should encourage more Muslims to come because they're natural social conservatives?

Neither. This is simply enjoying the enemy experience a breakdown of their self contradictory system. Team red opposes muslim migration for various reasons, despite the fact that those migrants may help own the libs occasionally.

Team Red also brings up religious freedom in every conceivable context, usually to get an exemption from a generally applicable law. I don't necessarily disagree with this, but it's an odd position to take for a group that then specifically opposes migration based on religion.

Perhaps that there is a cost to the vaunted “diversity” mantra even in terms prog would agree with. And thus if diversity doesn’t always lead to outcomes considered good, that means there can be too much diversity.

Now whether I consider this outcome of “diversity” is good is irrelevant. I think there are pros and cons of diversity. But exposing the social desirability bias lie that diversity is necessarily positive is useful.

The takeaway is more for liberals as far as I can tell. That there is a real cost to embracing a far group to short term own the outgroup.

Seems to me that conservatives should (and won't) take this lesson. Someone pointed out here in the past that it is okay for conservatives and TERFS to unite on the trans issue, because their beliefs are so radically different in every other aspect that there is no danger of cross-contamination (my words, not theirs. I can't remember who said it and where it was said, so I'm just writing the way I remember it).

Conservatives should learn from this that any ally whose only connection to you is that you have the same enemy is not an ally at all.

Working with TERFs is fine because radical feminism is an ultra-niche ideology that is in itself in decline, has limited institutional power, and advises things that will never attract most women like political lesbianism, separatism in general and so on. “TERF” in general is also used to describe a lot of libfems and even center-right women who are gender critical, so the number of actual TERFs is even smaller than you might think.

“TERF” in general is also used to describe a lot of libfems and even center-right women who are gender critical, so the number of actual TERFs is even smaller than you might think.

I was including this group when I wrote "TERFs", so the group is larger.

The # of TERFs is so low and the alliances I've seen are much fewer. But that is true.

"TERF" doesn't mean "TERF", it means "otherwise standard feminist who doesn't agree with the trans". They don't actually have to be radical feminists.

Sure. I still think they are currently a negligible sum of people. Women with heterodox value sets are very rare.

Why are they wrong? Are you suggesting that working with TERFs would give them enough power that it would be worse than not getting the benefits of working with TERFs?

Yes. I can see conservatives rallying behind an otherwise unsuitable candidate because they're against calling a trans woman a woman. And then being surprised when that candidate votes against their interests in everything else.

Conservatives should restrict mainstream Muslim immigration because (1) mainstream Islam is impossible to reform, (2) mainstream Islam believes that music is sinful, (3) there is no proven longterm assimilation of mainstream Muslims, (4) Muslim nations oppress Christians and so why on earth would we allow any to migrate to predominately Christian lands. Of course, this has nothing to do with LGBT stuff, but it’s vastly more important, isn’t it? Imagine a religion that would gladly burn every trace of Bach and Mozart. I would gladly burn any trace of that religion!

Because even with all the issues, they're better than the alternative!

The alternative is that we demand native birth rates to increase, or, you know, East Asians and Hindus and Igbos

I don't know what's been your experience with demanding things, but mind's not so great. If the elites want to do something, they will, even with massive populist sentiment opposing it.

What's the conservative takeaway supposed to be here?

That the people crying online about the fascists were looking in the wrong direction. This is what theocracy looks like, if you want to take it that way.

It really isn't. They didn't ban the flag as such, they banned it on government buildings.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property...The resolution, which also prohibits the display of flags with ethnic, racist and political views

If anything, it's just good old fashioned secularism and color-blindness.

The Left has won more thoroughly than I thought if even the woke-skeptical Motte is just buying into their narrative that banning their religious iconography counts as theocracy.

They didn't ban the flag as such, they banned it on government buildings.

Which makes it the same type of ban as Florida's "book bans", which didn't actually ban any books, merely removed them from certain government buildings.

Steel-manning here, because I mostly agree with you, but theoretically any sort of "told you so" can potentially be used to

1: Convince the other side that you know what you're talking about and they should listen to you on other topics

2: Convince the other side that they're wrong on this particular issue and should change their stance in order to stop digging themselves deeper into the hole.

3: Convince third parties that the other side is wrong and stupid and they should join you instead of the other side.

1 pretty much never happens in politics ever. It rarely even happens in local personal interactions, although it sometimes does. 2 can sometimes happen, and that seems like the most feasible route here. Mass immigration and demographic replacement is bad, now the left has more of a reason to agree that it's bad, even if for completely different reasons than the right, and maybe pointing this out will make them more amenable to coming together to solve the issue. 3 seems plausible. Each person has a reason or a set of reasons why they're on the side they're on, and how wholeheartedly they're on that side. I'm center-right specifically because every time one side does some insane nonsense I try to distance myself from them, and both sides do it frequently but I perceive the left as doing more damage with their crazy schemes so I distance myself more. Although most people don't treat things the same way I do, I think there is some of this effect, especially in younger and more undecided people. Even if pointing out the insane hypocracies on the left is unlikely to change the minds of people who are firmly on that side, anyone on the fence can see that and, if they agree, be more likely to become right, or at least a more intelligent left that doesn't replicate that flaw.

That we should allow immigration in quality and quantity in such way that we will be able to thoroughly assimilate them.

Dosage makes the poison.

Take 2 Tylenol, you’ll feel better and negative symptoms will subside.

Take 4 Tylenol, and negative symptoms will be eliminated but you’ll strain your liver.

Take 40 Tylenol and you’re fucked.

The topic of Muslim conservatism has been talked about to death for years now, and I keep posing the same query: am I to be elated that this intersectionality grift keeps collapsing like a house of sand? Should I care if, amidst a home invasion, one burglar beats down another? Both men wish to fleece me of my belongings, any "shared interests" I might have with the former is a fleeting one, if anything. Not a 1:1 comparison, of course, (and no, I'm not calling migrants "robbers") but this "gotcha" stuff is only good enough as a meme generator for "cringe lib gets owned compilation #314". Reactionary politics cannot tilt the vogue in my favour.

take a page out of America's right-wing playbook

Again, what is the American right's playbook? I see this brouhaha about how "The Right is now the counterculture" but virtually all hardcore leftists believe they're still the counterculture and do all the countercultural work in the media, entertainment, etc. Sadly, I think rightists are taking the wrong conclusion, that like some law of historical thermodynamics, these views and policies will change.

Let me put less abstractly.

Two groups break into your house and want to steal your daughter. One wants to mutilate and sterilize her, the other wants convert her and marry her off so she has lots of grandbabies.

In a perfect world, I'd love to not be forced into those options. To leave the abstract, I'd love if a conservative moral authority had it in them to say loudly, and proudly, and with their hands on the levers of power (and the monopoly on violence) "Nobody is going to mutilate and sterilize your kids, or convert them to a foreign religion and forcefully breed them".

Alas, I don't live in that world.

In this extreme example, I choose grandchildren. Even if they may wind up believing funny things.

Edit: On a side note, while at one point I used to be horrified as Islam's perspective on women and "western decadence", my native culture seems to have done everything in it's power over the last 8 years to prove Islam right. So I guess there is that too. I'm not rushing to convert. But San Francisco has proven there are worse things than an Islamic Theocracy.

The North American right's material position is vastly different from the European... All the Muslims in north America made it through a traditional immigration system and largely are middle class with a few nere-do-well sons that occassionally join gangs... nothing like what Europe faces with its massive underclass of islamic disfunction.

Likewise the Anglosphere has a large meaningful right wing counter culture whereas europe doesn't.

Insitutional left wing media is monstrosity with a skinsuit of legacy brand drawn over it... No Canadians give a damn about the CBC, Disney and hollywood aren't driving culture or building new brands, etc. Basically all the new culture is being developed by individual creators or being imported from various international sources like anime, or Eastern European video games... etc. In addition to the already thriving Country cultureand the paralell red tribe culture that already existed.

As far as I can tell NONE of that has a parallels in Europe or even Quebec. I was in Quebec recently and it was like being time warped back to 2012... none of the big cultural shifts have penetrated.

Every ethnic group in Europe is still in the Thralls of their regional state backed media becuase they'll actually produce shows in their language or mutual not understandable dialect, in the Case of the UK...

North American anglo-culture is just vastly more online, nebulous hard to tact down, and its legacy media has aged and died far faster.

A career in Media or Entertainment in North America right now is akin to being an Auto-worker in the 80s waiting for your plant to shut... and everyone knows it. Basically every Hollywood movie over the past several months has bombed, and most of the studios are looking at layoffs...Everyone under 50 knows working for a magazine or a newspaper is basically a Career kiss of death at this point, and everyone's desperately trying to make the jump to the post insitutional influencer economy.

And as far as I can tell basically everywhere outside North America is 5-10 years atleast behind it on the trend.

...

What should Europeans take from the North American right's Handbook? Probably very little.

Even you internet is heavily regulated and institutionally controlled and gate-kept in a way ours isn't

but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.

Any examples / articles / links?

For liberals it also creates a bizarre spectacle. They've been obsessed with white Christian "fascists" and often turned a blind eye towards immigrants. Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.

Is that bizarre? For every story about Muslim voters breaking from the Democratic coalition on LGBT issues there's going to be dozens with (overwhelmingly white) conservative Christians as the antagonist. Like, if I were a Democratic strategist and I had to choose between centering conservative Christians and centering conservative Muslims in messaging, I'd be an absolute idiot to prioritize the latter. Or even give them much bandwidth at all. While minority voters are somewhat more conservative that white progressives (though significantly less so than white conservatives), social conservatism doesn't usually drive their politics.

social conservatism doesn't usually drive their politics.

Which is going to bite you in the backside when you're bedecking the White House in the Progress Pride flag and have your transgender guests flashing their boobs on the lawn. Yeah, they vote for you because the local representative is from their ethnic clade and makes sure that the right people in the community get paid off, but they don't share your values no matter how many Muslima superheroines with two mommies you make movies about, and when you expect them to fall in line with the progressive minority you're courting, they may react very differently.

And yet, letting American memes (and the prosperity that they seem to breed) naturally & nonviolently melting-pot away the newcomers' less endearing traits seems to have a pretty good track record. You still end up with a disproportionately immigrant underclass, but that's also part of the plan, isn't it? 'Immigrants get the job (that natives dont want to do) done?'

letting American memes (and the prosperity that they seem to breed) naturally & nonviolently melting-pot away the newcomers' less endearing traits seems to have a pretty good track record

It does have a good track record, which is presumably why it's been decried as racist in recent years, and can no longer be suggested as a viable outcome.

That worked when there was the belief in the melting pot, and that the name of Irish/German/Indian/whomever could be folded into the common name of American.

But now it's all identity politics, and adopting the values of the wider culture is white supremacy, doncha know?

I'd be an absolute idiot to prioritize the latter.

That certainly depends on if you need to punish heretics or defeat pagans more. If you need to prevent internal defections from the in-group, focusing on the latter makes perfect sense. If, on the other-hand, you need to circle the wagons to not be completely overwhelmed by the out-group, well, a lot can certainly be overlooked in an emergency.

Fascinating that wokeness inspires such multi-partisan revulsion that it can create "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"-style coalitions like this.

The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, no more... but also no less.

Non-unique, comrade. We are social animals, and that means jockeying for any advantage, even from a weird political coalition.

The Titan submersible suddenly became very hot culture war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Titan_submersible_incident

The wikipedia link is quite thorough.

TLDR as of 2023-06-22 000000z seems to be:

5 people are trapped on a submersible that has lost contact with the outside world.

It was trying to visit the wreck of The Titanic.

Major effort rescue is on under way.

They are running out of air in the next couple of hours.

The name of the vessel is Titan (come on, no one can be that brazen, you are tempting fate)

The people are couple of billionaires, explorer, and the CEO of the company

The vessel can be opened only from outside.

The vessel used some off the shelf parts (like a logitech controller) and somewhat exotic materials.

Now comes the culture war

  1. Somewhat lack of empathy for the people there because of their status in the crazier places of the internet.

  2. The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.

  3. Surfaced a recording of the CEO bragging how they don't want to hire 50 years old white guys because they are not inspiring.

To me actually 2 is the most interesting one out there - 1 is just internet being the internet, 3 - if a small error could lead to death - hire the most safety oriented, pedantic and boring people there are to design your product.

But with silicon valley moving more and more prone to overtaking the meatspace - their physical products kinda suck. From smart thermostats to fridges to whatever we actually have degradation of the experience. So I think we are in a rough ride. And the more products they make smarter or move fast - the more human lives will be at stakes.

I'll just draw a brief comparison to my "Skin in the Game" rant from a couple days ago.

We have here a massive contrast to the problem I pointed out with most elite institutions.

In this case, the particular man responsible for the failures put his own life on the line as part of the process.

So, regardless of what else you think of the guy, he didn't slough the consequences of his decisions off on someone else. If they got stuck and had to suffer for days of slowly dwindling oxygen supply, he was down there suffering with them (unless they killed him or he killed himself first).

Compare that to this little bit from the aforementioned rant:

The overarching issue is that no matter how much damage an elite causes through their decisions, no matter how foreseeable that damage was, no matter how incompetent and unsuited for their position they are, the system as it currently operates does not allow them to actually suffer in any way that matters. There's no 'feedback loop' or filter that catches bad elites early on and keeps them from advancing to positions of greater power or enacts harsh consequences when needed to dissuade others from misbehavior.

In this case, the CEO willingly put himself into a position where his own survival and comfort would be compromised if the comfort or survival of his customers, riding in his vehicle, depending on his decisions, was compromised. His incompetence, to the extent it impacted the outcome, would impact him as well.

The feedback loop and consequences in this case were pretty much instantaneous. We don't even have to go through a lengthy investigation and trial, nor wait for a vengeful family member to attack him. If the submersible imploded, he died. If they survived for days in agony, he suffered... then died.

And now he has filtered himself out of the system, so whatever bad decisions and processes he may have been following are shown to be defective, and the person pushing those decisions and processes has no more influence.

And, in theory, this should make future incidents of this particular type substantially less likely, so the system as a whole is stronger for his absence, although we can certainly mourn for the people he took with him.

I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early history, with brave men inventing wings, strapping them on, and jumping out of towers. Jumping to their deaths. Others were more cautious and built gadgets to help them understand wings and lift. Wind tunnels were invented late. Before wind tunnels they used the whirling arm apparatus.

A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.

The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.

The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.

It is utterly untrue that elites have no 'skin in the game'.

Where do elites live? The downtown core of major cities. If violent crime spikes in Manhattan or San Francisco, it's rich people who suffer more than the middle class. Middle class white picket fence Americans don't live in Manhattan, they don't live in downtown SF, they don't live in the Loop in Chicago. They live in safe suburbs that are themselves largely insulated from the effects of elite decisionmaking.

During the pandemic, my rich parents' neighborhood (Greenwich Village, Manhattan) which was and is one of the most expensive zip codes in the country, measurably got worse. They're tough on crime, but by and large, wealthy people in Manhattan voted for the most 'pro justice reform' mayoral candidates. They supported Alvin Bragg for DA. When garbage piles up and homeless people accost them in Washington Square Park, that's the direct impact of deinstitutionalization and 'justice reform'. When upper-middle class whites support affirmative action, they're directly making it harder for their kids to get into top colleges (yes, even with muh legacy admits factored in). I know tons of very wealthy people who truly believe and advocate for higher taxes on themselves. I know plenty who don't, of course. But many do. Rich parts of LA like Santa Monica are full of homeless encampments that directly make the lives of the wealthy people who live there worse. Again, much more skin in the game than in the average safe suburb of a midwestern city.

Sure, the absolute pinnacle of these movements are a little more insulated; I imagine that Alexander Soros has a bodyguard (although that's probably as much because of threats from schizo Qanon types as it is because of random dangers in the city). But in the merely moderately-wealthy segment of the PMC (say the 97th to 99.95th percentiles) there's a lot of skin in the game.

The ordinary rich take the subway in Manhattan. The actual elite do not; they don't really have skin in the game as far as subway crime goes. That includes both the ultra-rich like Soros and the political elite... when's the last time Alvin Bragg took the subway when it wasn't a photo-op?

Does the Manhattan DA get a driver? Bragg’s only making $200k a year and seemingly has no family or business wealth (he’s worked for the state in various capacities for decades), so if he doesn’t I assume he’s taking the subway. I know multiple people who’ve seen de Blasio on the subway, have seen city council members on the subway, those are ‘political elite’ of the city I guess. I doubt Adams takes the subway, but that’s just because he’s a social climber who lives beyond his means.

And in any case, even rich people who don’t take the subway are still affected. My mother doesn’t, but my parents like taking a walk after dinner, like going to the park for long walks on weekends (last time I was there in [edit] December a couple of schizo homeless were ranting incoherently and scaring off tourists by the carousel). They deal with it, I know because they and all their rich friends discuss it all the time.

Yeah I mean when he was public advocate or the borough park councilor, I know the mayor gets a motorcade.

It is simply, absolutely and utterly untrue that elites have no 'skin in the game'.

So why do they continue to pursue measurably harmful policies, and indeed policies that fail on their own terms with very little to show for it? Like, when is the last time any big-name politician admitted their policy didn't work as intended and then stepped down or was punished in some way as to make amends for the failure?

The example I provided of Chesa Boudin, whose policies failed, abjectly, at reducing criminality in his district. But now he gets to teach a new generation of lawyers to carry his policies forward, probably to other towns around the country.

Why does anyone still take the man seriously?

When upper-middle class whites support affirmative action, they're directly making it harder for their kids to get into top colleges (yes, even with muh legacy admits factored in).

I'm really not sure I count the majority of "upper-middle class whites" as "elites" for our purposes. They don't have the sort of influence on policy outcomes, nor do they have the sort of wealth that can actually swing large-scale outcomes that marks someone as 'elite,' although perhaps they may be the elites of their local environment.

And I would bet you can't find any situation where a particular Congressperson's children were unable to gain admission to the school of their choice, even if they were rich and white.

And let us make the point clearer: by making it harder for your KIDS to get into school, you are in fact MAKING SOMEBODY ELSE SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES of your actions.

Show me people who are in favor of actively making their own chances of getting a particular job or promotion or admission to [institution] worse!

That upper-class whites are being made substantially worse off by a particular policy prescription while the persons in charge of setting and administering the policy endure no consequences is in fact the problem. Because upper-class whites who DON'T support the policy are still eating the consequences, and cannot do anything meaningful to fix it.

I know tons of super very wealthy people who truly believe and advocate for higher taxes on themselves.

Get back to me when they actually start signing checks to the government of their own free will. Literally nobody is stopping them.

"Supporting higher taxes" is really not putting more skin in the game. You would want the people who are in charge of spending the tax money they collect to be heavily motivated to spend it well, however.

Usually, the person most incentivized to spend money efficiently and effectively is the person who earned and properly owned it.

Rich parts of LA like Santa Monica are full of homeless encampments that directly make the lives of the wealthy people who live there worse. Again, much more skin in the game than in the average safe suburb of a midwestern city.

So why are the homeless encampments allowed to persist? Whose policy decisions lead to this outcome, and why aren't they being removed from power and run out of town on a rail (literally or figuratively) so their influence is completely eradicated?

If the persons whose job it is to resolve the homelessness issue is directly suffering from said problem, why aren't they extremely motivated to make progress on it?

The average safe suburb is safe BECAUSE the people in charge of handling such matters as vagrancy probably have a lot more to lose if they can't keep the homeless population down and the streets safe. The ones who failed will be selected out and won't keep influencing the outcome.

You're missing that the real key factor is that skin in the game means you get filtered out if you make bad decisions.

It doesn't have to be literal death, but you should be in a position to lose all your money, prestige, and/or influence in the event that you make decisions which demonstrably worsen the lives of thousands of people.

If you're a banker and you lose your depositors' money, you shouldn't get a golden parachute into another high-paying job. You should lose all your money along with them and never be given a job in the financial sector again.

If you're a politician and you implement a policy to eliminate homelessness, if the data shows no impact on homelessness after millions upon millions of dollars spent, you should probably be removed from office and possibly tarred and feathered. Or at least, maybe you should be required to live in the same conditions as the homeless folks you were trying to help.

The point is less that "elites aren't ever going to confront the results of their policy choices when the entire world is made worse off," and more "elites are never going to suffer consequences that are fully proportional to the harms their policy choices cause."

The issue is the asymmetry. An elite causes 100,000,000 units of dis-utility across a large population, but only suffers about 10 of those units themselves, so their incentive to fix things in minimal compared to the suffering as a whole. And perhaps worse, often the elite is able to extract 10 units of utility by causing 100,000,000 units of dis-utility, and is thus rewarded for it.

What I want is symmetry. If you're asking people to risk their lives on a submarine you designed and built yourself, the least you can do is risk your life alongside them!

If you're a banker and you lose your depositors' money, you shouldn't get a golden parachute into another high-paying job. You should lose all your money along with them and never be given a job in the financial sector again.

If you lose all their money because you committed fraud, sure. If you lose all their money because no decision has a 100% chance of working and there's some tiny but unavoidable chance of losing all their money, no, you shouldn't.

You could demand that people not be permitted to buy fire insurance so that if they do something bad that burns down their house, they have to suffer the consequences of their bad judgment. This is not normal practice, because insurance has a purpose. If they lost the money of their depositors for reasons that are not fraud or recklessness, the golden parachute is essentially insurance, even if they got it as part of industry practice rather than by paying a monthly premium.

If you lose all their money because no decision has a 100% chance of working and there's some tiny but unavoidable chance of losing all their money, no, you shouldn't.

As determined by whom?

I think the actual relevant question is whether you were making some kind of guarantee that the money would be safe or you were giving them an informed risk such that it was clear that if [extremely low probability event] happened, the money could be lost.

And again, the point here is to disincentivize taking bad risks, and incentivize good behavior, else they might decide to take certain risks that were not originally agreed to because why not?

If the risk is indeed that tiny, then holy cow they should have no problem putting their own money at risk as well!

If they're not willing to, I read that as a strong signal that they think the risk is actually larger than that!

You could demand that people not be permitted to buy fire insurance so that if they do something bad that burns down their house, they have to suffer the consequences of their bad judgment.

This is in fact why most insurance policies have exclusions for fires caused intentionally or by gross negligence.

It's also why people pay higher premiums if they're considered higher risk... or why deductibles exist.

If the risk is indeed that tiny, then holy cow they should have no problem putting their own money at risk as well!

That doesn't follow. Again, by this reasoning, we shouldn't have fire insurance, because if you want to do something with a non-zero risk of starting a fire, you need to assume the risk yourself. You point out that insurance has exclusions and deductibles, but by this reasoning people shouldn't have insurance at all, not just have exclusions and deductibles.

The entire point of insurance is so that you do not have to take on a risk with a tiny chance of happening but a large value if it happens.

I'm also pretty sure that a golden parachute is not as good for the banker as not losing his job and not needing to use the golden parachute, so considered as insurance, there's already a deductible built in, in the amount of (value of job - value of golden parachute).

You point out that insurance has exclusions and deductibles, but by this reasoning people shouldn't have insurance at all, not just have exclusions and deductibles.

Insurance companies are agreeing to 'assume' the risk of the fire occurring.

But they won't pay out of if set the building on fire intentionally (if they can prove that) and they calculate premiums based on various factors that increase or decrease fire risks.

There's a whole area of research behind moral hazard that examines how the knowledge that one is insured can change behavior.

Take this to the extreme, if a policymaker has reason to believe that a given policy is likely to result in more housefires occurring (say something stupid like mandating all houses have to be constructed of wood), but also that they, themselves, will pay no consequences as a result of this policy, then what actual incentives are there against implementing it?

We want our policymakers and decisionmakers' interests to align with the interests of the people they affect.

With housefires, they generally are aligned. Nobody wants their house to burn down, and they buy insurance to mitigate a relatively small risk that can have outsize influence on them but nobody else.

The problem arises when the person or persons who pays the cost is not the one who is making the decisions or policy.

Would you pay for fire insurance for a house you didn't own?

Insurance companies are agreeing to 'assume' the risk of the fire occurring. But they won't pay out of if set the building on fire intentionally (if they can prove that)

I agree that if you lose people's money because you committed fraud or negligence, sure, you shouldn't get a golden parachute, That's the equivalent to setting the building on fire intentionally.

and they calculate premiums based on various factors that increase or decrease fire risks.

The "premium" is "we're hiring you to run the bank, and part of your compensation is the possibility of getting a golden parachute if something bad happens". The premium isn't a separate line item, but the banker is still paying it--the bank wouldn't have been able to hire the banker without either providing it, or providing other compensation that makes up for its absence. And when they hired the banker, they certainly would have tried to assess how risky a banker he was when deciding how much and what kind of compensation to offer.

It's insurance, just with extra steps.

It’s possible that many elites just believe in ideologies that are both harmful to them and the wider population. In fact I think this is often true. I’m not sure why this is seemingly not included in your example.

Plenty of people believe in entirely stupid things and always have. The rich person who suffers because the ‘justice reform’ candidate they voted for wins by a hair and lets their environment deteriorate might just believe in a bunch of really dumb memes. “Everyone acts in their absolute self-interest all the time” is the logical flaw in your reasoning. People often do things that aren’t in their best interests.

It’s possible that many elites just believe in ideologies that are both harmful to them and the wider population. In fact I think this is often true.

Then these ideologies should hopefully die out when the adherents keep getting filtered out every time their policies fail and they lose any and all influence they might have accrued to that point.

Not enable them to make endless excuses and to continue on unabated.

If not, then it all just builds up to a much larger, catastrophic failure further down the line.

The issue, again, is that their ideologies ALSO often enable them to duck or shift consequences, possibly indefinitely... until the whole system blows up at once.

We want to filter out these problems early enough that they don't pose larger risks later.

“Everyone acts in their absolute self-interest all the time” is the logical flaw in your reasoning. People often do things that aren’t in their best interests.

And people should be positioned so their own screwups blow back on them in proportion to the damage they cause, so that the system as a whole can improve when they're removed from it.

It's not about being 'absolutely' self-interested all the time, but making sure that your self interest is at least aligned with those whose interests you represent so that there's an incentive for you to AVOID screwing them.

Most elites, seemingly, have gotten to a position where they can enrich themselves without regard as to whether they're causing damage or no.

I think that in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of the truly rich live in very safe areas. For example, in San Francisco itself many of them live in Pacific Heights, a neighborhood that is extremely clean and has close to zero presence of homeless people. These rich people's exposure to violent crime is very small unless they deliberately go out of their way to travel into the more crime-ridden parts of the city. Incidents like what happened with Pelosi are exceptions that prove the rule.

3 - if a small error could lead to death - hire the most safety oriented, pedantic and boring people there are to design your product.

Really sounds like Oceantech is just a big grift. What if the 50-year-old white guy grimaced visibly upon seeing this death-trap and demanded all kinds of expensive tests and redesign work? 'Not inspiring' might well be code for 'knows what he's doing and wouldn't touch our work with a barge pole'.

Couldn't agree more about the unsuitability of 'move fast and break things' in areas with big downsides. Most software is non-critical, yet stuff like AI or bioweapons/gain-of-function should be treated with extreme care. But it's not just Silicon Valley that is to blame - random research groups like EcoHealth and so on messed up bigtime.

What if the 50-year-old white guy grimaced visibly upon seeing this death-trap and demanded all kinds of expensive tests and redesign work?

https://abc7chicago.com/missing-titanic-sub-oceangate-lawsuit-david-lochridge-submersible/13409850/

Exactly that happened. And they fired him.

I don't think the firing had anything to do with his race or age though, it appears to have happened purely because he was saying "wait a minute, I don't think this thing is safe".

They seem to be counter-claiming he wasn't an engineer and didn't listen to their senior engineer saying it was safe.

But - (1) if your CEO is making a big point out of "I don't hire 50 year old white men", how senior/experienced is that engineer? and (2) if he's not hiring the experienced older submariners/Naval guys, then he's leaving a lot of valuable knowledge on the ground (e.g. "nah that won't work, we tried it fifteen years ago and Johnson exploded").

I don't see a strong culture war aspect to this one actually. As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone thinks that thing was obviously a death-trap and the CEO was an idiot. There's only a little variance on how hard to sneer at the passengers for being foolish rich people and whether to trash the CEO for claiming he "didn't want to hire 50 year old white guys". Okay, they're foolish, but they've suffered pretty severe consequences for it. And the CEO sounds kinda racist with that statement, but I think he actually cares more about not bringing in anyone who would question the bad design and lax safety practices than their skin color - the staff pics I've seen look pretty lily-white.

A few other notes that I picked up in my reading about this:

The hatch is only rated to a third of the depth they were diving to, and the pressure vessel was never actually proofed to any depth at all. It's made of carbon fiber mostly, which tends to shatter instead of deform when over-stressed.

The life-support limit is a bullet point on a document, and a suspiciously round number. Nobody knows how they actually came up with this number or whether their life support systems were ever actually tested with 5 people for 96 hours. It's not clear how it works either or what its failure modes are. It's possible it could lead to an abnormally high oxygen level, which makes the environment highly flammable, and doesn't appear to have any firefighting capabilities or smoke mitigation systems.

The hatch is installed in the center of the endcap of the cylindrical vessel. It's pretty clearly designed to only be opened on the submersible sled thing it gets launched with. It seems likely to me that if the sub was floating on the surface and the hatch was opened, it would rapidly flood and sink. Maybe slow enough for people inside to get out, maybe not. I guess (if it made it to the surface) being able to maybe get out and float around on the surface in the middle of the Atlantic is better than definitely suffocating, but not a lot. I guess life vests, survival suits, and life rafts would be too much to expect here.

Right now it's looking like the submersible did indeed shatter. The more I read on their website, the crazier the whole thing seems: their previous version only went down to 500m, this one they were trying for 4000m.

It's hard to speak ill of the dead, given the CEO went down on this trip, but the entire philosophy seems like "try moonshots and don't be held back by the regulators" which is great if you're mucking around on land but not so great when an "oopsie!" means you're crushed to death by the water pressure of deep ocean.

'I don't want to hire the old guys like the other companies do, I want young and exciting original thinkers' is a bad decision because the old guys are the ones who've seen how things fail and when, and if they were saying "uh yeah I don't think so" then firing them to be replaced by 20+ year old who goes "totally let's use a game controller" is not the best idea, yes?

I really like how several people have already explained to you that the game controller is one of the sanest parts of the debacle, but you continue to treat it as a slam dunk.

Well, given their other design decisions, is the Logitech looking like such a good choice now?

Yes, it has been explained that game controllers are used elsewhere. I am not aware that other submersibles use them, please inform me if that is so. And while it may not have been the worst part of the whole package, I think that when you are doing something that could go very badly wrong very fast involving human life, being cautious and making sure you have robust systems in place is better than "Well the Navy use it for surface level machinery!"

The controller is the only sane-ish part. The xbox controller is ergonomic, sturdy, reliable and indestructible. My x360 one that I bought in 2006 is still going strong. PS4 is comparable although slightly more clumsier.

"try moonshots and don't be held back by the regulators"

It is also great in the water. As long as you don't put humans inside. Conduct couple of hundreds of tests - your consumables are literally bags of sand and pipes.

On the ‘floating on the surface of the Atlantic thing’, I believe the water above the titanic is too cold for that. You’d just have hypothermia listed on your death certificate instead of drowning.

A good point. Which means they'd need survival suits and/or a good life raft to not die of hypothermia in minutes. Which they may or may not actually have time to put on in their teeny little sub with freezing water gushing through the giant hatch on the side, even if they had them, which they probably don't. But is there even any point in bringing along that kind of gear given the other issues?

And all of this is probably irrelevant anyways, since it now looks like it did indeed shatter on the ocean floor. Which means the whole crew got mashed into paste faster than they could blink.

I guess it actually was cost-cutting! No need to make it reasonably practical to survive on the surface in this thing when it's already so shoddy it'll probably fail catastrophically at depth anyways.

Well, the idea is probably to put the survival suit on, then open the hatch. But they probably don’t have room for survival suits and life preservers and the record on sub accidents, even ones with experienced designers and no cost cutting, is not keen on crew survival anyways.

Bit hilarious visiting the Titanic and... not making provisions to evacuate your vessel safely in case of unforseen events, though.

Indeed. Like the [H. L. Hunley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L.Hunley(submarine) and it's famous 300% crew fatality rate.

I think more than these questions, it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries. Despite this, the occupants are nearly certainly lost, and would be so even if the vessel had been located by now. The near-zero probability of a rescue was very quickly made apparent to everyone.

It is interesting, to say the least, which imperilled lives cause governments to move mountains without a second thought or rational hope, and which lives may be lucky to see a dime and only then after the case has been proven in a half dozen impact studies and feasibility examinations and pilot programs. Probably one of the more perverse urgency/importance failures yet, but one can't really go around saying the government is too good at reacting to acute crises.

It is good training that creates nice PR, it is relatively cheap - all of the people involved are on someone's payroll already.

The message - we got your back is important into building a common identity. And the most important thing - it is easy and requires comparatively little recourses compared to something like homelessness, public safety or low educational results. It is a well defined goal that even if technically challenging is not quagmire.

it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.

Well, what else were we supposed to be doing with all those ships for the last 4 days?

A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.

It's good skills practice for everyone involved, and unlike many "life-saving" expenditures, if these people are saved they have a very high likelihood of going on to live productive lives that are a net-benefit to those around them.

and unlike many "life-saving" expenditures, if these people are saved they have a very high likelihood of going on to live productive lives that are a net-benefit to those around them.

I can take "we're spending all this money on training personell, we might as well give them an exercise in something that looks like IRL conditions", but:

  • this feels a bit callous

  • oh yeah? What are they gonna do, invent a new proprietary smart-device juice squeezer that will lock you out if it hears you do a racism?

oh yeah? What are they gonna do, invent a new proprietary smart-device juice squeezer that will lock you out if it hears you do a racism?

Go on the speaking circuit to present their cautionary tale.

And present a ghostwritten book on daytime TV.

I mean… one of the people on board was the CEO.

Seems like he had a net negative impact on everyone who went on this particular expedition.

Yeah, but he was almost certainly going to face charges for operating an uninspected submarine if he survived. Even if it’s not technically illegal, that’s because it never occurred to anyone there was a need for creating a specific law against opening to the public a poorly tested submarine where the qualified personnel had been replaced by diversity hires and a PlayStation controller, and the process is the punishment.

The steelman: if the occupants of the submarine are saved (which is nigh impossible at this point) he would be made an example of: his company discredited, he himself fined and possibly jailed. As it is, the sub will either not be found, or it will be found filled with corpses, which also serves as an example of what not to do but is arguably not as effective as having a person to haul in front of a courtroom.

You’d be surprised how often something like this happens.

Even when it’s a mass, impersonal threat, we can really throw a lot of resources at the problem.

It’s especially striking given that reports are coming out that navy sonar heard the implosion, but the search was launched anyway. Its not like it would have given away vital intelligence, I’m sure the implosion was pretty damn loud.

I mean, they could guess, but you keep the search going until you're certain anyway. You never want to err on the side of assuming they're dead if there's a chance they're alive, however slim.

Oh, so my second guess was right about the navy knowing but not bothering to tell anyone. Wonder why they decided to keep the drama going for a whole week? Very convenient thing to have taking up the news cycle right now.

The military is not generally in the business of giving away intelligence unprompted. I’m sure there are thousands of very important court cases the NSA could solve right now if they decided to peer through those giant datacenters they have.

Very convenient thing to have taking up the news cycle right now.

Interestingly, I had the opposite reaction. This story is only as big as it is because there was basically no other news this week.

The Navy may have known it was something but they may not have known what it was until they got news about a missing civilian submersible. I don't think we can or should look for a conspiracy there.

It is interesting, to say the least, which imperilled lives cause governments to move mountains without a second thought or rational hope, and which lives may be lucky to see a dime and only then after the case has been proven in a half dozen impact studies and feasibility examinations and pilot programs.

Well, there's the fact that these folks are rich, sure. But you'll get vast resources sent your way for a rescue if you're a collection of children as well: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65871238

To be fair I also have had very similar thoughts about the response.

OP also missed another angle of the culture war - that some of the people in the sub were "GOP Donors" and therefore deserved to die. Just as insane as using reasonably affordable components to justify their demise. Wild!

The El Faro and Emmy Rose are all also pretty well-known examples of significant search and rescue resources being sent and continued long after any serious chance of rescue have long turned into recovery.

Already some discussion on this topic happening over in the Small-Scale Questions thread

In the emerging Culture War aspect: it's interesting that the "50 year old" part is relatively much more operative than the "white guys" part than usual.

The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.

How important this is probably depends a lot on how bad it is if this fails.

The death of everyone inside probably warrants the caution.

Don't think this is culture war as much as "it was inevitable".

company moved fast and broke things

I am glad to see SV get torn a new one. As a MechE turned CompSci person, the difference in ethos between both fields is shocking. It is one thing to have a careless approach when human lives aren't at stake. But to then throw shade towards fields where safety is paramount is classic SV hubris.

their physical products kinda suck

Thanks for saying this out loud. Credit where it is due to Apple. It is the only tech company that knows how to make robust physical products.

It seems like the "move fast and break things" ethos could still have a proper place in physical engineering. I look at SpaceX, for example. They move quickly and break things... until they have a reliable product they can safely put humans on. Falcon 9 is arguably the most reliable rocket in the world, because they were willing to move fast and break things.

What would that look like with a deep submersible? Maybe an autonomous version that gets extensive testing and use before you put people on it? I don't know.

I'm not sure I even agree that you can't move fast and break things with people, if those people are fully aware of the risks and willing to accept them. If Columbus had waited until it was totally safe to cross the Atlantic then it never would have happened. There's some risk level that would make space or deep sea exploration not worth it, but I don't think that risk level is zero. Personally I wouldn't be willing to take the risks necessary to be a pioneer, but if other people are willing to do that I don't think we should make regulations to stop them. Now if somebody is hiding the risks or telling people that something is safer than it really is then that is a major problem and should be illegal.

It seems like the "move fast and break things" ethos could still have a proper place in physical engineering.

It does, it's just that we stopped having an existential need to do it, so we have the luxury of judging that "no risk is worth it". After all, there's nobody about to bomb us into the Stone Age if we're wrong about "it wasn't worth the risk".

Of course, 20 years of that and you're getting arrested for letting your children play in the front yard (because don't you know there's a 1e-9 annual risk of them getting snatched?), going outside without a mask (because don't you know that there's a 1e-9 risk of a healthy person under 60 dying of the Apocaflu?), or telling your son he's not a girl (because don't you know... yeah, you get the picture).

I'd be careful picking SpaceX or anything Elon does as a positive example of 'move fast and break things', the whole thing might very well end up like OceanGate.

Seems pretty unlikely at this point. They already have (arguably) the most reliable rocket in the world.

The rocket is ok, but I'm not sure I try their accounting. There was a leaked email from Elon about how they have to get Starship to orbit if they're to make any money, and I don't see that happening. Generally with Elon, there's a whole lot of hype, and not a whole lot of substance, so if the investor money dries up, his entire empire might come crashing down.

But I hope I'm wrong!

I don't know why you're so skeptical of Starship? They've clearly been making tons of progress on it. Hell, they even launched a failed test.

I can see why you might call Elon a bit of a hype machine, but really, he has delivered on quite a lot of his hype.

Electric cars? Yep

Electric trucks? Yeah

Self driving? Eh, no

Charging network? Yeah

Tons of battery manufacturing? Yeah

Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Reusable Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Reusable Heavy Orbital Rocket? Yeah

LEO satellite internet? Yeah.

Tunnels under every city? No.

I don't know why you're so skeptical of Starship? They've clearly been making tons of progress on it. Hell, they even launched a failed test.

Why am I supposed to get so excited about a failed test? Give me a fraction of the money Musk got, and I'll do a failed test too. As a bonus, I'll do none of the damage to the infrastructure, and environment that Musk did!

Electric cars? Yep

I'll stick to my Volkswagen, thanks.

Electric trucks? Yeah

Complete garbage that will never operate on anything close to the economy of a normal diesel truck.

Charging network? Yeah

Tons of battery manufacturing? Yeah

What's supposed to be so fancy about either of those, and where does Solar City fit into these?

Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Like I said, it's a decent rocket, but hardly mindblowing.

Reusable Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Reusable Heavy Orbital Rocket? Yeah

Reusability is way overblown, and I haven't seen much evidence it brings all that much (any?) savings.

LEO satellite internet? Yeah.

That's the thing he was crying about in the leaked email that is unprofitable, and why he needs Starship to make money.

Tunnels under every city? No.

Tunnels are an ancient technology, and his aren't any better. Also while we're here, let us meditate on how insane the idea of "hyperloop" is, and how it didn't go anywhere despite all the hype.

But what you were saying is he doesn't deliver on things... not that you don't like the things.

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Like I said, it's a decent rocket, but hardly mindblowing.

Reusability is way overblown, and I haven't seen much evidence it brings all that much (any?) savings.

SpaceX resulted in massive price reduction of getting to orbit

My god, can you imagine the drama inside that tiny ship over the past days? I think I'd bet at 90% that the CEO is already long dead, killed by the 4 others in order to save oxygen. Two of the people are a father-son duo, and in a power struggle they might have killed the others too, knowing that they can only trust family. I really hope they find that thing so we get to know what actually happened.

It's not super clear to me that a decaying body releasing gases (while in a tight container) actually extends the breathable atmosphere meaningfully for the remaining occupants.

It's not clear to me either, and it wouldn't be clear to the occupants too, but life and death situations don't tend to make you more reasonable and level-headed, killing the CEO is the "we must do something, and this is something" option here.

There are many examples of similar cases of people getting trapped (often building collapses or mine collapses, expeditions getting lost, shipwrecks etc) and murder is very, very rare in them as far as I know.

In how many of those cases was the person responsible for the accident due to corner cutting trapped with them?

For shipwrecks, the captain would certainly bear a lot of the responsibility. I don't know how rare captains getting murdered during shipwrecks was historically though.

Maybe in the age of sail... When Blithe could be court martialed for losing his ship to a mutiny or Byng be executed for failing to pursue the enemy...

But no one actually believes in classical responsibility any more where one is accountable for outcomes and any technical failure is prima facie evidence of a personal moral failure... Unless he was actually stupid enough to admit aloud the game controller's blue tooth wasn't working or something obscene, and "Accident" would be assumed to be an "Accident"

Bligh was found not guilty, given another ship, and sent back on the Providence to finish the job of bringing breadfruit to the Carribean. Alas, slaves would not eat the fruit. He was later captain of the Director on which he successfully engaged three Dutch vessels and captured one.

He played a critical role in the Battle of Copenhagen while captain of the Glatton. Nelson refused to acknowledge the signal to stop battle, and Bligh, who alone could see both signals stood by Nelson.

Nelson ordered that the signal be acknowledged, but not repeated. He turned to his flag captain, Thomas Foley, and said "You know, Foley, I only have one eye — I have the right to be blind sometimes," and then, holding his telescope to his blind eye, said "I really do not see the signal!" Rear Admiral Graves repeated the signal, but in a place invisible to most other ships while keeping Nelson's "close action" signal at his masthead.

Bligh was also court-martialed for the Rum Rebellion, and again acquitted.

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This seems relevant.

It’s not clear to me that they’d blame him.

It seems pretty clear to me that 5 people in an airtight box is a much better situation than four people and one cadaver in an airtight box.

EDIT: On reflection, if they’re stuck on the sea floor, 40 degrees might be cold enough for decomposition to be negligible. If they’re floating around on the surface, I still think it would be a terrible idea.

Supposedly one of the ROVs has discovered something that looks like a (new) debris field, so I'm guessing they've all been dead since Sunday.

The way the vessel was built and operated embodied the SV ethos. There are reports that it was not certified or audited by anyone, that the hull testing procedures were not adequate, that the company moved fast and broke things. So right now said ethos is having torn a new one.

there have probably been thousands of dives since the 80s. something like this was inevitable given the inherent risks. the problem with engineering are the unknown unknowns. Maybe some corrosion or weakness in a wire caused the sub to fail--something that hardly anyone considers and seemingly mundane...like a piece of foam hitting a tile at takeoff, a piece of metal on a runway, a rubber seal leaking due to unforeseen cold, etc.. Had this occurred 20+ years ago, it would have gotten a lot of media coverage but not like we are seeing now. twitter as always showing its power to create news cycles in and of itself.

If you read the history of the vessel - I am sure it was the known knowns. So was the challenger - they knew it was too cold for launch. They knew about the o ring erosion that shouldn't be happening. And in the foam case - they knew there were debris. I have been trying to explain for a long time to people I work with - if it works and you don't know why or in a way you haven't anticipated - that it is just trouble waiting to happen. Even the 737 max was quite easily predictable, and on the A440 that crashed over the Atlantic was from known issue.

In the deep you have completely different envelope - mostly your weight is virtually unlimited compared to aerospace. Which can get a lot more leeway to design first the oh-shit modes and then the normal ones. Proper real time communication with the mothership, more supplies, hatch opening from inside, spare logitech controller. I know that all of sudden all internet virologists and trans/gender scientists right now took a fast phd in submarine design - but this project specifically seems to have had a lot of bad ideas and practices from the start.

mostly your weight is virtually unlimited compared to aerospace

Your weight is virtually unlimited, but your density can be an issue. I'm reading that a major reason they went with a carbon fiber section in the hull was that they could maintain significantly more buoyancy that way, whereas if they'd used titanium everywhere they'd have needed to add separate syntactic foam floats too.

Proper real time communication with the mothership

It's supposed to have this, isn't it? The history of "communication was lost, at least briefly, every single time" is another one of those normalization-of-deviance red flags that's come up.

I can't seem to find any details on the communication system, though, other than a debunking of the "Starlink broke!!1!one!" idiots. Cameron had voice contact at the bottom of the Mariana Trench via acoustic modems, so it's not impossible, but what did Oceangate actually choose?

I'm reading that a major reason they went with a carbon fiber section in the hull was that they could maintain significantly more buoyancy that way, whereas if they'd used titanium everywhere they'd have needed to add separate syntactic foam floats too.

Apparently pressure-capable syntactic foam is expensive, but another traditional solution for deep sea exploration is to use gasoline tanks, which are slightly bouyant and not compressible. See the original Trieste, which reached Challenger Deep in 1960, and also managed to surface automatically in the event of electrical failure.

Or maybe they could have used the carbon fiber tanks as floats, and if they shatter, you make sure you have enough excess buoyancy to still surface if one of them goes, because you'll be unlikely to lose more than one at a time.

spare logitech controller

I refuse to believe that they only brought one.

… I forgot to charge the back up…

This really does seem plausible given this company and what is coming out regarding it.

There are spare controllers kept onboard, but is not clear whether the submersible also had manual controls or other redundancies.

It was tongue in cheek ... on the other hand whether they were tested before every mission is anyone's guess. So is whether there is Bluetooth redundancy on the receiver. It will be combed over by the authorities.

It would be insane if they did. Game controllers break all the time.

Especially those shitty logitech ones.

Proper real time communication with the mothership

This would require a cable connection which gets tricky for 4000 meter deep dives. Radio communication rather famously doesn't work underwater. You can only get ground to sub data transmission at a few bits per second and even that requires tens of kilometer long antennas with megawatts of transmission power.

Bouys that maintain their depth are not an option? It's not like the sub needs completely freedom of movement if they're just exploring a wrecked ship.

You still need a cable all the way to the surface, whether that's a single long one or multiple shorter ones (much more likely to break). There's a reason deep sea dives have traditionally had the support ship right above the sub.

Somehow it feels counterintuitive that you can't use buoyancy for support.

I saw some tweets saying that a cable would buckle under its own weight, but some quick math shows that not to be much of a problem. Amazon shows 100ft coax cables are about 2.5 pounds. A 4km version would be roughly 330 pounds. And that's in water, where bouyant force is going to reduce the apparent weight by quite a lot, especially if you jacket the cable with something not so dense.

And that's in water, where bouyant force is going to reduce the apparent weight by quite a lot, especially if you jacket the cable with something not so dense.

That's exactly the principle that seems to be in question. Whether you rest the cable on a bouy, or jacket it in something buoyant, the result should be the same. Though I can't tell you whether that means it's going to work or not.

If the ship was directly above, I don't see why a few kilometres of cable wouldn't work.

Alternatively, acoustic communication.

Yeah, but from their own website, there's a lot of "exciting new tech!" they're boasting about, which seems to turn out to be "so we made it lighter by using carbon fibre but heh heh nobody's tested if carbon fibre can handle those depths but we're not gonna wait around for someone to do that as it could take years, trust us you won't die (unless you do, please sign this waiver)".

there have probably been thousands of dives since the 80s

An order of magnitude less, in my estimation. A dive expedition is extremely expensive, and there were none at all between 2005 and 2019.

Surfaced a recording of the CEO bragging how they don't want to hire 50 years old white guys because they are not inspiring.

Didn't the CEO also fire a 50 year old white guy for points out the safety issues?

For a moment, let's consider how people would react if a different race/gender was put in there and something like this happened... I would imagine there would be a fair amount of smug going around.

If that guy was on record saying he wouldn’t hire black guys, he’d have a whole different set of problems. Imagine being trapped in a tin can with Papa John.

Imagine being trapped in a tin can with Papa John.

Easy there Satan... Some horrors are too much for mortal contemplation. lol

Would have been nice if papa John were on the sub tho

@netstack, @orangecat, @FiveHourMarathon

I got some reports about these comments being low effort, antagonistic, and "reddit tier commentary". I don't think the comments are bad enough to escalate to the level of being an official mod warning. But I do just want to put out a reminder that people come here for a certain level of quality in their posting, and they don't always appreciate these types of comments.

Imagine being trapped in a tin can with Papa John.

Easy there Satan... Some horrors are too much for mortal contemplation. lol

Would have been nice if papa John were on the sub tho

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But with silicon valley moving more and more prone to overtaking the meatspace - their physical products kinda suck.

confusing how this relates to silicon valley at all? What's the connection here? Oceangate isn't a company from or base in silicon valley.

The "move fast and break things" libertarian-style ethos is a common cultural type in Silicon Valley.

But i dont blame a random chinese company screwing up on silicon valley just cuz ethos is similar?

Diving tourism isnt exactly a silicon valley focus

So is Microsoft ... and yet it is considered a SV company.

Sure, but thats cuz their businesses are congruent with silicon valley, plus they have huge silicon valley presence, and talent revolve between msft and others…

A product manager from google isnt exactly the ideal candidate for this diving tourism company. Doesnt make sense to me at all


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