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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.

Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.

What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.

I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.

Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.

France has been rioting forever , well before even the French Revolution...it does help to put in perspective how for all the ink spilled over blm, that it's way worse elsewhere in the world. America's left-wing unrest tends to be much more astroturfed compared to elsewhere , which is why there are such long gaps in-between occurrences, or why such unrest ends so abruptly, or why BLM and antifa choose to protest some deaths but not others (minimal protesting over the death of Jordan Neely).

Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak.

A key point you're ignoring here is that such racialized rioting doesn't happen nearly as frequently in the US. When it does happen it also never comes from any sort of immigrant group that failed to assimilate---it's not at all fair to try to fit summer 2020 in the US under the same framework and use it to make arguments about assimilation. Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.

There's an alternate framing of the narrative that actually supports the liberal point of view here (I think you're aware of this?). Yes, the French method of forcing assimilation is silly and doesn't work, but this doesn't mean that assimilation is doomed and will never happen. Rather, we already have a model of assimilation---race aware and everything---that works extremely well in the US. The French should copy this instead of sticking their heads in the sand about human nature and ignoring the necessity of actively combating the insidious power of irrational bias against people that look different.

Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.

They do better than blacks. Crime statistics for Latinos in this country are significantly worse than whites on every metric; the fact that they do better than native blacks is a sign of just how low blacks set the bar, rather than any sort of salutary reflection on Latinos.

There is some evidence that legal immigrants - people who went through the whole process of obtaining citizenship, rather than people who came here illegally and were then retroactively made into citizens - commit crimes at reasonably low rates; however, their children generally regress to the rate of criminality one would expect based on their racial background.

This was also true of Irish and Italian immigrants for many decades - their rates of criminality were considerably worse than native Anglo whites - and they really only began to assimilate to Anglo norms after the 1924 Immigration Act cut off the supply of further immigrants from their home countries. At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that, and after massively contributing to the shocking levels of corruption and inter-ethnic violence which blighted American cities during the Gilded Age - is not in fact the sunny and optimistic pro-immigration story that 21st-century immigration advocates think it is.

Furthermore, if you want to come and see non-assimilated multigenerational immigrant communities in America, come to my home city of San Diego and spend some time around the East African neighborhoods; you’ll see loads of women in hijabs and men in traditional dress, and I went to public school with these people’s kids and saw how different they were from the “assimilated” groups. They are not a useful data point in favor of your thesis.

Can you be more specific about what exact differences you see between East Africans in San Diego and the general population? The one example you gave---dress---is pretty superficial and doesn't really seem relevant unless you have some very strong and idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences. I'm also not going to count examples where East Africans do better than the general population since these would be examples of successful assimilation.

What are the non-superficial/non-appearance-based points where East Africans immigrants in San Diego are significantly worse than the general population?

The one example you gave---dress---is pretty superficial and doesn't really seem relevant unless you have some very strong and idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences.

So, I actually strongly disagree with this, because dress is the easiest way to signal to locals that you are eager to assimilate. It’s incredibly difficult to learn a new language as an adult, to change one’s moral assumptions and values, to pick up all the various folkways and pop-culture knowledge which distinguish locals from outsiders; it is not difficult at all to go to Goodwill or Salvation Army and purchase a $2 t-shirt and some secondhand jeans. If I were to emigrate to, say, Iran, the very first thing I would do is buy a couple of outfits to wear in public that would signal “I know I’m a guest in your country, and I’m making a basic effort to indicate that I respect your local customs and am trying to fit in.”

The fact that these East Africans immigrants do not adopt local modes of dress and comportment is not due to a simple oversight or laziness on their part; their women dress the way they do because of specific strong religious and cultural injunctions to do so. So, right off the bat, they wear their reluctance to assimilate right out on their bodies for everyone to see.

And it’s not like the foreign mode of dress is a false indicator, and if you talked to these women you’d find they’re just like us. They are far, far more devoutly religious than basically any native resident of this city, and their religion very obviously influences their behavior and their relationship to their families, their husbands, and strangers. These women are very quiet and submissive, at least to men, and often have large families of children, aged closely together.

And to be clear, I’m not even saying these are bad behaviors! I’m no feminist, and I wish that white American women would temper their outlook to become more like these woman in certain select ways. I think that conservative dress and a quiet demeanor around men are usually net-positive qualities, although I don’t think they should be enforced via domestic abuse, which as I understand is pervasive in the particular communities in question. But these all mark these people as very distinctly different, in ways that can’t be read as anything other than defiance, since they can easily look around then and see that the vast majority of people here dress a certain way, and it would be trivially easy to imitate that if one wanted to.

As to their children, they too - especially the daughters - tend also to be very religious; the first person I ever knew who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance was a classmate of mine in first grade, a child of Muslim East African refugees, who had a religious objection. (Again, not saying the Pledge of Allegiance is based - I don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance nowadays - but it’s certainly a strong indicator of not wanting to assimilate.) The boys seem less so, and my experiences with East African guys has been almost uniformly (though not entirely) negative. The first kid who bullied me in middle school was of East African descent, as was the first one who actually physically hit me for the first time in my life. Later on, the guy who robbed me in public was also a second-generation East African from the nearby East African neighborhood.

So, again, if your claim is that immigrants to the US are overwhelmingly eager to assimilate to local norms of behavior, then I think this particular community is a notable example of one who very visibly defies that assumption. We can argue about whether the ways in which they deviate from local norms are positive or negative, but the important thing is that they’re real and obvious.

Ok, I think we have two different standards for what assimilation means. To me, assimilation is just adapting well enough to the host country that you provide more benefits than harms. If I'm not mistaken, you seem to require something more: a level of conformity to the culture that's already there in as many ways as possible---dress, food, religion, etc.

Benefiting more than harming of course does not mean completely ignoring whatever the native culture is at the time. There's a good example brought up on SSC here.

(one more hypothetical, to clarify what I’m talking about – imagine a culture where the color of someone’s clothes tells you a lot of things about them – for example, anyone wearing red is a prostitute. This may work well as long as everyone follows the culture. If you mix it 50-50 with another culture that doesn’t have this norm, then things go downhill quickly; you proposition a lady wearing red, only to get pepper sprayed in the eye. Eventually the first culture gives up and stops trying to communicate messages through clothing color.)

I do count immigration breaking a norm like this as causing harm. Similarly, I would usually only count immigrants who learn English as fully assimilated.

Why do I think my standard for assimilation is better? The short answer is first that western countries, in particular and even more so the US, haven't had a homogenous culture to conform to for a very long time. Talking again about clothing, people aggressively refusing to conform through fashion is one of the most central things in American society---like how much do you remember from high school? Why does it matter whether they stand out by wearing all black and spiking their hair or by wearing traditional East African clothing?

I really think the article linked above is the right way to think about it---"western" culture is just a bunch of the most compelling parts of all cultures in the world mashed together into one plus some overarching "Noahide laws" to optimize it for assimilating others. I would in addition claim that this culture is superior to all others because it's the best we have for promoting technological and scientific development. Therefore it's good that this is what dominates the country and we shouldn't return to whatever there was before.

More specifically, extreme tolerance for non-conformity and diversity is one of the most important part of the Noahide laws that make it work. You need a broad spectrum of weird and unexpected, and possibly even threatening ideas for there to be innovative breakthroughs---simply put, innovation can't occur unless there are enough people that are actually thinking differently. I don't think it's a coincidence that Silicon Valley grew out of the most non-conformist part of the US. Any requirement that immigrants assimilate by conforming breaks this important part of the greatness of western culture.

At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that

I for one look forward to it, since it's an argument a lot of anti-HBDers make that I haven't seen a good answer to.

If you want to read about turn-of-the century Italian homicide rates, Jeffrey Adler's First In Violence, Deepest in Dirt talks about the Italian community in Chicago which had murder rates upwards of 40/100k in the 1910s. This was a pattern that extended to other cities. IIRC it was Philadelphia where one-third of prisoners were of recent Italian background in the 1910s or 20s but I can't remember where I read that at the moment. Notably southern Italy where the great majority of Italian-Americans came from also had a very high homicide rate in the 19th - early 20th centuries, and when you remember that crime data in 1850s Italy was probably less than complete, it was likely even higher. Southern Italy of course no longer has homicide rates like this. They're still higher than in the north but it's like 0.7 vs 0.5 or something like that.

When I have tried to engage with the 'HBD' controversy in the past I always run against a wall of statistical and mathematical arguments that I don't think I'm smart enough to evaluate, but this huge and rapid drop in criminality would seem to me pretty difficult to explain through any framework where criminality is mostly a function of genetics.

Coleman Hughes is a big advocate for the idea that African-American culture (as distinct from African-American DNA) is deficient in ways which makes young African-American men prone to criminality, and IIRC he's repeatedly drawn the parallel with mid-twentieth century Italian-Americans.

To be fair, that hypothesis isn’t incompatible with HBD. African American homicide rates are shockingly high by stable first world country standards and there can be multiple ingredients in that recipe.

Absolutely.

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this huge and rapid drop in criminality would seem to me pretty difficult to explain through any framework where criminality is mostly a function of genetics.

Another argument is often the difference between Mexicans living in border towns between the US and Mexico. The same people, culture and genetics yet murder rates are often vastly different.

Sure, I'll grant you that this seems to be evidence against HBD. However, I think it's still a highly effective theory, and certainly more parsimonious than bullshit like systemic racism and the like. The evidence, at least IMO, seems to be pretty net positive overall.

Maybe there's something interesting going on here, like the lead ban and decreased criminality in all demographics but didn't close the black-white gap. I'm waiting for that effort post myself!

Something I’ve never seen accounted for in discourse about the decline in criminality is the shift towards firearms using smaller bullets being the default available in America- when criminals used magnum revolvers and sawn-off shotguns their victims were less likely to survive than they were from a 9 mm round.

Not sure the difference is that significant for handguns even if it's only a single round -- and one should probably take into account that popular nines tend to hold ~3x as many rounds as a magnum revolver. (which would probably be on the expensive side for a fifties criminal anyways? The stereotypical crime gun from the era for me is a "Saturday Night Special" in .38, max)

Shotguns are probably still used quite a bit in crime? And if one were to replace a sawed-off shotgun with something with more gangster cred, that thing would probably be a MAC-10 or something, so I wouldn't really say it's necessarily less destructive.

Criminals use larger bullets nowadays- most gunshot wounds pre 1990s were from small caliber pistols like a .25ACP or .22. Very few crimes were committed with a .45, which is very common today.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/GUIC.PDF

Relative to shootings involving small-caliber firearms (reference category), the odds of death if the gun was large caliber were 4.5 times higher (OR, 4.54; 95% CI, 2.37-8.70; P < .001) and, if medium caliber, 2.3 times higher (OR, 2.25; 95% CI, 1.37-3.70; P = .001)

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2688536#

That's a fair point, but I don't know if historical records are that granular, but if anyone wants to dig into it I'll be looking on.

I don’t see it. One, there was an exogenous shock in the reduction in lead exposure. Second, isn’t the problem somewhat self correcting in that the really violent often end up dying young and thereby decreasing the odds of passing on kids

I would assume that the kind of violent people with low inhibition and self control would be more likely to reproduce due to a propensity for unprotected sex.

Of course, that's the case today, but perhaps fertility rates were high enough back then that it wasn't significant.

And we have a very different idea of what really violent looks like now compared to back then, just to add another confounder to the mix.

Do we?

Did you mean to respond to my comment?

Latino crime rates have converged with white. This is old data and I know they updated it the past few years to show even a smaller gap.

https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Latino+crime+rates

There might even be less age adjusted crime today in Hispanic populations than white.

I have a lot of concerns with crime but Hispanic crime doesn’t seem to be a real issue in America (education gaps are).

I don't find that at all convincing.

…if we restrict our analysis to major cities of half a million people or more and compare the average crime rates for the five most heavily Hispanic cities–Albuquerque, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso–to the those of the five whitest–Oklahoma City, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Portland. This time, the more Hispanic cities are the ones with the lower crime rates–10 percent below the white cities in homicide and 15 percent lower in violent crime. A particularly remarkable result is that gigantic Los Angeles–50 percent Hispanic and frequently perceived as a dangerous urban hellhole–has violent crime rates close to those of Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in the nation at 74 percent.

I spot checked this and El Paso is 80% hispanic and 3% black while Indianapolis is 50% white and 28% black. You can't look at that and use it as proof that hispanics and whites have similar murder rates. Plus hispanics tend to get filed under "white" in the statistics which makes the white numbers look worse than they otherwise would.

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/demographics-cloud-optimism-black-violent-crime-decrease/

The researchers, who released their findings in the current issue of Criminology, indicated that studies on black violent crime -- a crime that involves force or the threat of force -- often fail to account for the rise in the number of Hispanics in the U.S. Since there is no Hispanic category in the UCR and approximately 93 percent of Hispanics identify themselves, or are identified by law enforcement officers, as white, most arrests of Hispanics are added to white violent crime rates. The Hispanic rate tends to be higher than the white violent crime rate, but lower than the black rate.

Middle Eastern and African migrants making it to the US are incredibly filtered as opposed to the dregs who wash up on European shores. Oceans tend to be handy in that regard.

The one group that causes the greatest uproar is arguably the segment of the US population that has been the least successful at integration (still better than the EU! At least Ebonics isn't an outright different language) are the ADOS.

The latter are a case of broad cultural assimilation except for sticking points that are unlikely to ever be sanded down in the near future, because of HBD or culture (I strongly think the former).

Middle Eastern and African migrants making it to the US are incredibly filtered as opposed to the dregs who wash up on European shores. Oceans tend to be handy in that regard.

I never really bought this argument. The US has also had a pretty big inflow of unfiltered immigration from Mexico/Central America recently. Previously, the US had an even larger (proportionally) unfiltered flow from Ireland/Italy/Eastern Europe. These immigrant groups seem to be doing pretty fine---definitely much better than MENA immigrants in France.

The one group that causes the greatest uproar is arguably the segment of the US population that has been the least successful at integration (still better than the EU! At least Ebonics isn't an outright different language) are the ADOS.

This particular group had been actively kept in poverty in deprivation until the late 60's and is still effectively (though not forcefully) segregated away from the general population. Obviously this group isn't going to be assimilated very well---HBD/culture are not the only plausible explanations! Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.

Our east asian and european immigrants are also doing great. Don't need any advice for them, they took to the forceful assimilation well. I know a son of vietnamese immigrants, he was almost too patriotic. Funny, smart kid, but when he asked for the french flag to be flown on bastille day at the school, people rolled their eyes. He's a tank officer in the french army now (he's short). The french do not have a problem with this kind of frenchman, they love him. Whatever 'ethnic french racism' there is has never made him burn a school.

Maybe increase welfare, since the root cause for senseless destruction must be poverty and lack of chances? It's already higher than yours.

Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.

Are you sure you didn't reverse your reasoning process here? You first look at which groups do badly, and then assume their treatment must be terrible.

Consider the possibility that they were treated the same - they had access to free school and university, generous welfare, a passably functioning job market - , and yet still behaved in a dramatically opposite manner as the vietnamese and europeans.

I think the more interesting comparison is between MENA immigrants in France and Mexican/Central American immigrants in the US. The US also has significantly poorer, more violent, and less stable countries to the south that send a large inflow of unfiltered, not always legal immigration. However, these immigrant populations assimilate well and do not cause nearly the same problems as MENA immigrants in France. Clearly something is working with the American system that is not working in France. Even other places in Europe do better than France---Vienna seems to assimilate immigrants just fine for example.

One possible explanation is that the French idea that you can just by law declare that everyone is the same and then forget about race is hopelessly naïve. However much you claim everyone is equally French, some people are going to just look dramatically different. The way human nature is, unless you take serious effort to educate people about the reality of race and discrimination and actively pass explicitly race-based policies to counteract it, de facto, social discrimination is going to make it impossible for immigrants to assimilate no matter what the laws from up high actually say. However well the law treats them, civil society is not going to treat them well. Who cares if you have the same access to welfare and schooling if no one will hire you or rent you an apartment in a nice neighborhood? If the teachers are horribly biased against you when grading?

I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate, or at least be good citizens in Latin immigrants to the US versus the ones going to the EU. Latin America is still far more stable than Africa or the ME is at any rate.

You can get by with poor quality migrant stock if you filter aggressively enough, while the average African migrant might be net negative, restrict yourself to middle class or wealthy Nigerian Igbos and you're going to do a whole lot better, like the US does, and the EU can't.

This particular group had been actively kept in poverty in deprivation until the late 60's and is still effectively (though not forcefully) segregated away from the general population.

I grant that they were poorer till the 60s and the end of segregation. However, I think it reflects worse on the ADOS than the US that they keep themselves segregated, or behave so badly that everyone runs away, as is the case with white flight. They certainly complain very hard when white people move back into the neighborhood, calling it gentrification.

Further, ADOS blacks don't exist in isolation, there are plenty of other ethnic groups that were dirt poor when they came to the US at a similar time frame, and yet managed to entrench themselves as productive members of society. Just off the cuff, Vietnamese, Japs and Chinese immigrants coming to the US before the 60s or even shortly afterwards were even worse off than the native AA population.

You inevitably end up with things as stupid as Structural Racism (or racism of the gaps as I prefer to call it) posited as explanations for the same, where a combination of HBD and culture are far more parsimonious. Especially when hundreds of billions in affirmative action have failed to close the gaps.

Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.

I struggle to see how it's even possible to falsify this, since ADOS are the only significant "involuntary immigrants" in the US, and the closest analogy, Native Americans, can't be called immigrants, even if they also do terribly as a group.

I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate, or at least be good citizens in Latin immigrants to the US versus the ones going to the EU. Latin America is still far more stable than Africa or the ME is at any rate.

Are you certain that this is an intrinsic quality of the populations? You can just as well argue that this is because the US is better at making immigrants want to be good citizens and assimilate because of the differences between the way it deals with race and the way France does. I also don't think it's that obvious that Mexico/Central America are more stable than the Middle East and North Africa. Murder rates are way higher for example. I'm not saying there isn't a difference in populations, but I've never really heard a convincing argument that there was. I have on the other hand seen many arguments and plausible theoretical justifications for why the US method of assimilation is better.

I struggle to see how it's even possible to falsify this

There's a sort of meta point here. This is sociology, not science and you can't really ask for rigorous things like falsifiability. Talking way outside my field here, but from whatever classes I took, it always seemed the best you can do is try to fit a bunch of examples into a narrative and just argue about which one is most compelling, maybe using whatever it is sociologists call "theory".

The "US is better at assimilating" narrative is consistent with all the examples (the claim I made above was that the ADOS example doesn't contradict it). It also has theoretical justifications---the whole thing about immigrants in the US actually being given a fair chance since the country isn't blind to unfair biases against them, for example. The "populations are different" narrative still needs some sort of justification why Mexican/Central American immigrant populations in the US are actually meaningfully, intrinsically different from MENA immigrant populations in Europe beyond just "I see a qualitative difference in willingness to assimilate".

Are you certain that this is an intrinsic quality of the populations? You can just as well argue that this is because the US is better at making immigrants want to be good citizens and assimilate because of the differences between the way it deals with race and the way France does. I also don't think it's that obvious that Mexico/Central America are more stable than the Middle East and North Africa. Murder rates are way higher for example. I'm not saying there isn't a difference in populations, but I've never really heard a convincing argument that there was. I have on the other hand seen many arguments and plausible theoretical justifications for why the US method of assimilation is better.

Even as someone who thinks HBD is almost certainly true and major, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it explains all discrepancies, just most of them. Culture certainly plays a part, and bad attractors end up dragging countries down. Certainly, measures like strict enforcement of the law can make a massive difference, as El Salvador attests.

I don't really have a very strong position on whether the US or France does assimilation better, but the former seems to benefit from both a better quality of applicants and well as a more strict immigration process, though not very much more on the latter. I could be wrong, since I only have passing familiarity on the topic, and mainly regarding skilled immigration, which is far more relevant to my own interests.

There's a sort of meta point here. This is sociology, not science and you can't really ask for rigorous things like falsifiability. Talking way outside my field here, but from whatever classes I took, it always seemed the best you can do is try to fit a bunch of examples into a narrative and just argue about which one is most compelling, maybe using whatever it is sociologists call "theory"

Popperian notions of falsifiability are vastly inferior to a more nuanced Bayesian approach where there's no way to literally 100% prove or disprove anything as a fundamental mathematical impossibility unless you initialize an agent with malign priors of 1 or 0, making them immune to further evidence.

When I say "falsify", I use the standard of overwhelming evidence such that only motivated reasoning would argue otherwise, either via outright dishonesty or simply by making an error (perfectly possible when the mainstream only pushes one view and suppresses others). I prefer to be charitable and think of the latter when arguing with most Motte users; unless the issue is that we agree on all the facts but disagree on their implications, which is likely an unresolvable values difference.

Even if sociology is harder to study than the harder sciences, it's still possible to operate outside a state of total epistemic uncertainty.

I think the Native Americans serve as a great second example. Forcefully immigrated? Not exactly. Forcefully moved and made part of the US? Definitely. The fact they also do poorly is a second data point in favor.

I feel bad for the poor bastards who were minding their business till they ended up a rarity in their own country. I'm sure they think that everyone else who came along later did a pretty terrible job of assimilating ;)

That being said, yes, I agree it supports the idea that HBD can overcome almost any well-meaning intervention that doesn't engage in eugenics to some degree.

On the other hand, there hasn’t been any serious effort to assimilate the African American population since the end of Jim Crow. And their culture is really bad.

I would point to groups that started out with poor cultures and self-domesticated, which would cover a lot of examples.

It certainly is the case that the stench of slavery and segregation provides a strong shield to dismiss any attempts at cultural uplift as being irredeemably racist and paternalistic, with guaranteed claims of the white man's burden.

I think such measures could do something to ameliorate the issue and are worth pursuing, but the evidence from the outcomes of black kids adopted out to white parents suggests that without some kind of eugenic intervention it's unlikely to close the gap. No reason not to try though!

Out of curiosity has there been any talk of semi permanently keeping a military-police presence in the banlieus? If they truly behave as a different nation, before you resort to bullets or violence, merely establishing your untouched presence(gangs) in a foreign land is enough to spiritually castrate the feelings of the native prowling males.

What are the army going to do? The army policing takes away from war readiness and turns the French army into just another developing world military largely deployed for internal ‘peacekeeping’ as an auxiliary force for the police. And the French already have the gendarmerie. If they just sit in base with strict rules of engagement, they’re useless and the locals will soon learn to ignore them.

Once you step back and remember that unlike America, France IS an active colonial power ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Françafrique ) having big riots every 10 to 15 years actually seems like an endorsement of having a legal system which is blind to race.

After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.

There might be indication of this being an unusually severe flare-up, or that forces on the ground feel otherwise, when we read the following communiqué by the main French police unions, essentially declaring France is in a civil war and that the police is in the resistance against the government:

"Now that's enough...

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give.

In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together.

Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities.

The time is not for union action, but for combat against these "pests". Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation.

All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible.

Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades.

For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given.

Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it."

I haven't verified the authenticity of this (I found it off some nobody on Twitter, and they were a left-leaning pro-capitulation to these ethnics), or know enough facts on the ground to interpret it. I've attached a screenshot of the original French.

/images/168830496294208.webp

You have to understand that in France all public rhetoric is much grander than it is in the Anglosphere, which seemed to have had a self-conscious moment sometime in the 1960s or 1970s after which grandiose speeches were declared eternally "cringe". Even Obama only partially got away with it, and that was mostly when he was quoting MLK or JFK or Lincoln or a founding father. This extends to everything (even corporate memos or emails from the CEO if you've ever worked with the French). By itself it doesn't mean anything. Macron himself makes grandiose speeches all the time about France's civilizational mission blah blah blah and nothing happens.

So when you hear this, and you imagine, like, a prominent police official in the US or UK saying this:

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

..and it representing this huge moment of change where the wool falls from their eyes and the civilizational meaning of all this becomes clear,

well, you're kind of thinking of it the wrong way. That's just how the French speak, loudly and with a very small stick.

I get this same feeling watching Putin speeches. Even through subtitles, there is a sort of aesthetic appeal that is wholly missing from the speech of American politicians.

I haven't verified the authenticity of this (I found it off some nobody on Twitter, and they were a left-leaning pro-capitulation to these ethnics)

It's on the UNSA Twitter (with a follow-up post saying that the 'we are at war' phrase was a reference to Macron saying the same about COVID.)

Thank you, and looks like French domestic media is already weighing in as well.

The mass delusion that is 'Integration' and 'Assimilation' keeps on giving.

These two concepts mean the same thing, functionally. Do I have enough plausible deniability to call the obvious outsider I am ingrouping an insider?

Note that this definition has nothing to do with real life. It's purely conceptual.

Outside of that these terms hold no meaning at all. Have I assimilated into a country when all I do is participate in its economy? That seems to be the barometer for most. It's hard for anyone with practical experience to get behind that definition but after we've deconstructed most of our societies down to economic blocks there's not much else to go on. So our newly arrived Syrian who just got gifted a new home renovates a newly furnished living room and kitchen on the local governments dime to separate them with a wall so he does not have to see his wife cook is just as 'assimilated' as any local because... OK, maybe not in real life. But he shows up for work and seem nice so my tend and befriend instincts tell me there are inroads to be made here. So I'll weave a fictional representation of reality in my head to support my instincts and admonish any representative of my ingroup who doesn't conform as being an evil person. I mean, who doesn't want to make friends? Such combative instincts can only lead to conflict and are obviously dangerous. The Syrian is assimilating, even if he talks arabic at home, even if he changes nothing of his behavior, even if he lives nigh entirely on the governments dime and gets treated to luxuries most people can hardly afford nowadays, like a single family home, whilst working a minimum wage job...

This is not 'assimilation'. This is a bribe. Please be my friend.

I've wondered the last few years ago, regarding China's treatment of the Uighurs, if there was a geopolitical rhetorical function to that treatment.

Basically, or so the argument would go, the number of states that would consider using concentration camps or muscular ethnic reshaping or even cleansing policies on their undesirable internal demographics is almost certainly much, MUCH higher than the number of states that are willing to publicly acknowledge it or actually overtly enact it as long as American unipolar hegemony is the order of the day. And so letting their own internal demographics shift in undesirable ways while forswearing certain ugly policy choices that they would prefer to use is a specific cost of accepting American hegemony.

In such a world, China blatantly engaging in, say, the use of concentration camps, and then suffering no meaningful consequences for it, could be an intentional, provocative signal of weakening American power, as well as an invitation to other countries to pull away from the current American led order and shift towards a multipolar international order where states can more aggressively manage their own internal ethnic demographics exactly as China does, all with China benevolently claiming "China promotes a world where state sovereignty is respected and the internal affairs of states are their own business".

I'm not saying I believe this, exactly, but I can see a certain logic to it.

(You could imagine an alternate history version of "Russia blitzkriegs Ukraine in 2022, grabs a bunch of territory, and then winds the SMO down" serving a similar provocative international signaling function about the diminished role of American power and a new era of states militarily contesting old borders, but the history we're currently in a much messier and more ambiguous than that)

When I was reading Tony Judt's "Postwar", about Europe after World War 2, one of the points he made is that (though no one wants to admit it because it is so uncomfortable to admit) Hitler to some extent got at least some of what he wanted in Europe, at least for a time; in the Europe that came out of World War 2, there was generally much more ethnic coherence in nations than there had been before World War 2, largely because of mass population displacement and ethnic cleansing. The role of that shift in the general (all things considered) European peace that followed and the rise of solidarity-based welfare states is, again, a seriously uncomfortable topic. See also Robert Putnam and the costs of multi-culturalism on social trust.

China blatantly engaging in, say, the use of concentration camps, and then suffering no meaningful consequences for it, could be an intentional, provocative signal of weakening American power,

When has the United States ever had the power to impose its will on the internal behavior of another great power? Did the Soviet Union suffer meaningful consequences for operating the gulags?

They specifically talk about "American unipolar hegemony", so I think they're specifically thinking about 1991-now (or whenever you want to argue that American hegemony breaks down).

Specifically, the dynamic is different because pre-1991, countries could get away with things the US didn't like as long as they were willing to suck up to the USSR.

Specifically, the dynamic is different because pre-1991, countries could get away with things the US didn't like as long as they were willing to suck up to the USSR.

The opposite is also true, states that sucked up enough to the US did get away with committing such atrocities, for instance Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh.

That doesn't seem like something the US didn't like. It seems like something the US didn't care too much about, and Pakistan was useful during the Cold War.

Well, let me try to run with your question, because I think my speculation is a bit orthogonal to it.

Sure, as a great power, the Soviet Union didn't suffer meaningful consequences for operating gulags. Rather, the fact that it was a super power and operated gulags meant that all other nations in its sphere of influence certainly could use similar tools with impunity, AND the U.S. was often forced to turn a blind eye, in the case of various unaligned or less aligned nations, to similar local policies that were offensive to U.S. sensibilities when the U.S. was competing for influence against the Soviet Union. The fact of the Soviet Union having and enacting different policies and norms changed the political environment that all other nations were operating in, especially in places like Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia that were decolonizing and not in the firm orbit of either superpower. Great powers shape norms in their sphere of influence, and those norms can be an attractive draw for possible members of their orbits. They can be a crucial form of soft power.

So my speculation isn't that China (a rising great power) demonstrates that it can do things that are offensive-to-U.S.-norms, and thus random nation x (a small, non-great power) can also now do things offensive-to-U.S.-norms without consequence. My speculation is that China (trying to end U.S. hegemony and shift to a new world order of multipolarity, with China being one of the poles) could, among many other initiatives, be offering up support of the use of demographic management approaches the U.S. current forbids as one of many carrots for smaller nations to pull out of the U.S. orbit and consider transitioning into a multipolar future where they see their interests draw them closer to China's orbit.

As I say, this is all just idle speculation, of course.

India got closer to the US while at least talking about sterilizing Christians. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were targeting the civilian Houthi population until Iran made them stop, not the USA. And of course Israel.

Hitler to some extent got at least some of what he wanted in Europe, at least for a time; in the Europe that came out of World War 2, there was generally much more ethnic coherence in nations than there had been before World War 2, largely because of mass population displacement and ethnic cleansing. The role of that shift in the general (all things considered) European peace that followed and the rise of solidarity-based welfare states

And this is yet another reason to hate mustache man (not like we needed any more).

I genuinely think the best solution is to just start shootin’. Muslim youths in France respect force, just like their prophet used and just like their rap idols extol in their music. If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.

The key missing topic in the discussions on the French riots is that these guys really want and enjoy to light things on fire and loot. I would too, if I hated the people in the country and could get away with it. There is fundamentally no way to counter that except with punishment, ie violent. The punishment has to come with no social approval — prison, while bad, comes with social approval among their culture. But pelting them with rubber bullets, going into their neighborhood and smashing their cars, going into their neighborhood with a helicopter filled with a gallons of durian juice to drop on their apartments… they very quickly realize that the benefit is no longer worth the cost. You essentially have to humiliate and subject them. Just like any of us would feel living in Singapore or Hong Kong, that we would be swiftly punished for malefaction.

I have a dog and one of the things most interesting to me is how reinforcement and punishment is so clearly on display in its most primal way. You have to think like a dog with her. I can’t chase her when she steals something, because she likes to be chased. Yelling is ineffectual, because she likes yelling (barking). Even slapping her paws would do little, because the way dogs play with each other is more aggressive than that. If I’m dealing with a creature that likes aggressive play, being chased, and risk, the punishment has to be very much not pleasant. So a good one is crate time, but if you can’t do that you can give a painful physical punishment — I don’t do the latter because I love my dog, but I think it’s fitting for people blowing up libraries and so on.

I think the idea the “French people will move on” is wrong. This is a blow to the morale of the French people. They have received a serious injury to their identity. Living among people who can destroy your car and shop whenever they want is demoralizing and in some invisible way probably leads to an 80k monetary injury per every affected Parisian resident. It decreases sum total happiness and induces a feeling of helplessness. So it’s really serious. It’s not the same as if it were 10000 unrelated instances of minor theft.

If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.

As far as Irish culture is from Islam, both have tended to make good use of martyrs. If we can learn from the wealth of experience the former has with rubber bullets the inevitable deaths that will result from large scale use will cause the more radical types to gain support amongst their own.

The Irish also made use of sympathetic Americans, but my guess is that present-day Americans have about as much or more sympathy for brown people being oppressed by police these days.

British policy during the Troubles was kind of the worst of both worlds. Oppressive enough that Northern Irish Republicans often had genuine experiences of police harassment, violence, discrimination, general hostility, but not brutal enough that they were actually scared. The Brits didn’t have it in them to go full auth, full Xinjiang, and why would they - the ethnoreligious conflict in Northern Ireland had zero salience to the rest of the UK where protestants and catholics had gotten along peacefully and with equal rights for a hundred years at least.

But Northern Ireland was always peripheral territory, not the metropole, despite it being part of the UK. English politicians, even on the right, usually supported unionism in Ireland only halfheartedly.

I'm sorry to go off on a tangent here, but in my experience yelling and scolding work perfectly fine on my two dogs. They certainly seem contrite about it from what I can tell!

It hasn’t been too successful for stopping mine from looting the closet for shoes. Although I think posture could factor in too (exerting a dominant position over dog)

I think the idea the “French people will move on” is wrong. This is a blow to the morale of the French people. They have received a serious injury to their identity. Living among people who can destroy your car and shop whenever they want is demoralizing and in some invisible way probably leads to an 80k monetary injury per every affected Parisian resident. It decreases sum total happiness and induces a feeling of helplessness. So it’s really serious. It’s not the same as if it were 10000 unrelated instances of minor theft.

The first riots in the banlieues were in 1981. In subsequent decades these regions were ethnically cleansed of their native and Jewish populations, as was widely documented in major movies, on TV and in the papers. Nothing about this is new. There have been some major stories. The French did nothing for 40 years, they're not going to start now.

as was widely documented in major movies

As of 2022, the movies were sending a slightly different message:

Abdel, an Algerian-French soldier, holds a press conference outside a police station after his 13-year-old brother Idir dies in hospital, the result of three apparent policemen beating and leaving him for dead. He appeals for calm, but a group of youth, led by Abdel’s brother Karim, disrupt the press conference by tossing a Molotov cocktail and raiding the police station. After stealing a weapons locker and a police van, the youth head back to their banlieue, Athena, where Abdel also grew up. They begin to barricade themselves - and the residents of Athena - inside the housing complex.

CRS riot police are sent to put down the uprising, while the youth respond by shooting fireworks and other improvised missiles at the police. In the middle of the chaos, a drug dealer named Moktar tries to move bags of contraband out of Athena. With the youth refusing to let him leave, Moktar and his gang take shelter in Athena’s shisha lounge, where they dig a hole to stash the contraband until the uprising has passed.

Abdel returns to Athena to attend a memorial service for Idir. He sees Karim and tries to speak to him, but the latter escapes where the memorial service is disrupted by the ongoing violence outside. Abdel then helps to organize an evacuation and shelter for Athena’s residents, including a former terrorist named Sebastien, whom Abdel shelters in Athena’s daycare center. While leading a group of residents past a group of riot police, an altercation begins, and Abdel and other residents of Athena are kettled and arrested.

On and on the tearjerker goes, until – rather endearingly– the whole thing is pinned on the truly agentic evil, The Chuds:

In the final scene of the movie, a man in a van is shown recording the beating of Idir, which is later posted on social media. The “policemen” are revealed to be far-right instigators in disguise; they enter the van, drive into the woods, and burn the uniforms they had worn, revealing that the beating was a deliberate attempt to incite racial unrest.

Looking into the director's background, I was surprised to find something rare in such cases in the US:

Costa-Gavras was born in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war. His father had been a member of the Pro-Soviet branch of the Greek Resistance, and was imprisoned during the Greek Civil War. His father's Communist Party membership made it impossible for Costa-Gavras to attend university in Greece or to be granted a visa to the United States, so after high school he settled in France, where he began studying literature at the Sorbonne in 1951.[1]

I was surprised to find something rare in such cases in the US

Greeks are quite overrepresented in Hollywood actually, given the tiny number of Greek-Americans.

On and on the tearjerker goes, until – rather endearingly– the whole thing is pinned on the truly agentic evil, The Chuds:

I'm not claiming the French movie industry of all things is secretly conservative, only that the French public are well aware of the issues with violence and crime in the banlieues.

I actually like French movies, both on the merits and due to appreciating this now-quixotic «existence of sovereign, living non-Anglo civilizations» idea. It's very much a shame that, as Zack M. Davis says about him somehow genuinely being a woman, is a scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.

Anyway, I wonder if the public – most of all the disproportionately aged, native public, like this woman – also believes the ongoing tumult to be some sappy melodrama downstream from a bit of entirely optional chud mischief, or maybe misunderstanding due to the insufficiently vigorous mandatory introduction to the State cult of Reason (that starts at 3 for the French).

Didn’t LePenne come in second in the most recent elections? With a serious chance as well? Seems like this just boosted her odds

Have you looked Le Pen's plans for the banlieues? They might surprise you with their relative modesty.

If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.

This is absolutely the way to stop the rioting animals, but unfortunately westerners are way too pussy to ever contemplate doing such a thing, and even if they were to do so the very next day there would be dozens of articles in newspapers deploring the "barbarity" of the state, conveniently ignoring that the rioters are the true uncivilized huns who would have run live bullets on the police without a second thought were the situations reversed.

They already have a martyr, so I don’t think adding 100 more will do them any good. France may get a terrorist attack in the future if they pushback on the North Africans, but the cost of these riots is already worse than the cost of the median terrorist attack in Western Europe. Right now, from any measure, it’s the lack of real pushback that is leading to increased rioting.

How do the Indians manage their public unrest, I wonder? Pussy or gigachad-like?

Burdensome is out for the count. @self_made_human, might you have any wisdom to share in his place?

Depends on who's rioting. If they're in the good graces of the government, they're usually allowed to rampage freely while the cops drink tea in the background.

If not, the police in India, while not nearly as militarized, are certainly not gentle. We can't afford actual riot gear for the most part, so expect the cops to wield bamboo shields and charge with batons, with tear gas and rubber bullets being a relative rarity. At least they don't shoot people particularly often, which is one of the few good things I can say about them.

And the media doesn't usually support rioters, most of the time. It's a big country so I can only speak generally.

This is absolutely the way to stop the rioting animals, but unfortunately westerners are way too pussy to ever contemplate doing such a thing

Normally I'd just say something about not using maximally inflammatory language - yes, you can advocate shooting rioters, yes, you can say you think Westerners are unwilling to use such harsh tactics even though they should, yes, rhetorical flourishes are allowed, but we'd prefer you not deliberately use pejoratives intended to provoke negative reactions and distract from your actual point.

However, you do this on purpose, and you do it for the explicit purpose of riling people. We know this, because you have a lengthy and terrible track record of posting comments like this just to giggle at how you stirred the ants' nest.

Last time you were banned for a week. This ban will be for two weeks. You are becoming burdensome and will probably not be here much longer unless you decide you'd like to start participating in good faith.

A charitable reading of @BurdensomeCount comment might find it less inflamitory than the police unions reference to the rioters as vermin, a specific class of animals. Or is the objection to the characterization of westerners as pussies?

Are mods susceptible to the 'othering' that can be seen in law enforcement that have repeated exposure to high crime cohorts? In those contexts it seems to result in uncharitable views.

We're not modding the French police union.

No. Obviously not. Nor is inflamitory a binary measure. An inflamitory scale could be vermin > animals > savages > barbarians (a notorious slur against the germanic people and other non greco-romans) > rioters > protesters > teenagers > joggers.

Reasonable people may disagree over the inflamitory nature of any particular word, as it relates to their specific linguistic or cultural context.

Modding for indelicate word choice and labeling as inflamitory when the 'inflamitory' word represents a necessarily small portion of the entire post, seems unnecessarily uncharitable to me. Especially when arguably more inflamitory nouns have already been deployed in the larger public discourse.

No. Obviously not. Nor is inflamitory a binary measure.

That's correct.

Modding for indelicate word choice and labeling as inflamitory when the 'inflamitory' word represents a necessarily small portion of the entire post, seems unnecessarily uncharitable to me.

Feel free to report my moderation as "uncharitable." As is always the case, when someone reports one of my posts, I will let another mod judge.

Feel free to report my moderation as "uncharitable." As is always the case, when someone reports one of my posts, I will let another mod judge.

This is the way.

Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.

Right, people in the West, in France in this case, are much too comfortable to do anything here. And that’s for a number of reasons.

  1. The threshold for “do something” is absurdly high. The most politically charged question for the French far-right is, of course, repatriation. That means stripping millions (at least 6-7m in France) of people of citizenship based on ancestry and then deporting them to a third country that doesn’t want them (you think Algeria or Morocco want millions more listless, angry young men?). This violates every constitutional statute, the EU, the ECHR. Most citizens still find even the idea of this shocking and distasteful. It is about as beyond the pale in Western Europe as banning women from the workplace or forcing 8 year olds back into factories. Even Zemmour, as I’ve said, doesn’t begin to hint at doing this.

  2. France is a highly ghettoized society. In building the banlieues on the periphery, the French ensured the inner arrondissements of Paris avoided the same fate as the downtown areas of many American cities from the 1960s onward. But the price for that was ignorance. In London, social housing occupied by Somalis sits next to $15m townhouses. In America’s great cities, at least in their downtown areas, you now can’t walk a few blocks without encountering the ravages of the underclass. In Paris, what is out of sight is out of mind. And France is so centralized that what happens outside Paris really doesn’t matter very much.

  3. The “choices” are becoming starker as demographics change. Even though the majority of the population remains native, birth rate disparities mean that a highly disproportionate percentage of young people - of particular relevance, obviously, young men - are from MENA communities. One can imagine a situation where 60% of the population is still native in 20 years, but 50% or even 55% of fighting-age males are from those communities. At that point, the situation is extremely dicey. The military and police have recruited from diverse communities heavily, there’s no guarantee what side they’d be on in a serious civil conflict. Most French with any money would flee elsewhere in the EU or overseas. A weak central government collapsing or maintaining limited control over a military kept in bases or deployed abroad and then roaming bands of young men fighting district by district is a possibility. At that point, one’s money might well be on the Algerians.

  4. Comfort will be prioritized until it’s too late. What is unreasonable will become reasonable too late. What is foretold will become reality too late. A Lebanese Civil War that started in 1958 would have likely been much better for the Christians (who then still constituted a majority, before the PLO was forced out of Jordan) than the civil war that began in 1975 was. Ben-Gurion even offered to carve out a state for Christians in 1956. But the Maronites of 1958 were too comfortable. They never thought their position would be truly threatened. They could not imagine the rivers of blood that would flow through Beirut.

So it goes.

In London, social housing occupied by Somalis sits next to $15m townhouses.

At first blush, this is an absurdity. Then I remember that race relations in the UK are different than in the US, with UK blacks ahead in life expectancy and nearly equal in earnings. I suspect this is largely a selection effect: a much greater share of blacks in the UK are elite immigrants from Africa compared to the US - though perhaps not Somalis.

One can imagine a situation where 60% of the population is still native in 20 years, but 50% or even 55% of fighting-age males are from those communities. At that point, the situation is extremely dicey. The military and police have recruited from diverse communities heavily, there’s no guarantee what side they’d be on in a serious civil conflict.

Guillaume Durocher, a thoughtful French nationalist on Twitter, believes that the most likely scenario in the medium-term is akin to Brasil rather than Lebanon or Yugoslavia. His reasoning is that this underclass has no real political aspirations, let alone organisational skills, and their aims are purely criminal and opportunistically short-termist in nature.

So France will resemble Brasil where a small elite hoard all the wealth and a sizable minority of middle-class whites sit just beneath them. Below those two rungs, crime levels and general dysfunction will proliferate, leading to gated communities etc. We could also see a lessening of France's social model with high taxes as elites will be unwilling to shoulder such a high burden. Given that elite migration will be a very real threat, France's institutions may well oblige.

I guess the only real counter-argument to his view is that race relations in Brasil seem to be more amiable. I know relatively little about either country, but my impression is that the resentment in France (perhaps in part due to the colonial legacy, and partly as a result of ethnic French arrogance) is much greater among the non-white groups. If this is true then your more pessimistic view could well win out.

At first blush, this is an absurdity. Then I remember that race relations in the UK are different than in the US, with UK blacks ahead in life expectancy and nearly equal in earnings. I suspect this is largely a selection effect: a much greater share of blacks in the UK are elite immigrants from Africa compared to the US - though perhaps not Somalis.

No, you were correct in your first understanding. It is a relatively small section of London, but in say, Notting Hill, you have large estates mostly divvied up semi ethnically e.g. Somali, Carribbean, Moroccan, cheek by jowl with £15m townhouses.

The road David Beckham lives on for example, is less than a 10 minute walk to multiple estates, and less than 20 minutes walk to Grenfell tower itself. This is (as far as I'm aware) a uniquely (West?) London thing, where the houses by Ladbroke Grove station will be £10-20m and yet 1 road next door will be a very poor housing estate. I used to think it was great, as an example of semi-integration (Ghettoisation leading to say bad shops, bad services). Nowadays, I'm ambivalent, but I appreciate its uniqueness.

There are relatively few places in London with $10-20m houses as standard (and as you say those are often concentrated in West and North London - Holland Park, Notting Hill/Westbourne Grove, Little Venice where the best villas border the Paddington Green estates, all the way up to St John’s Wood especially on the northwest side as you get up to Swiss Cottage, then also Belsize Park and Hampstead), but on a lesser scale it happens with $2-5m properties in Islington in the north, around King’s Cross, in Hackney and Shoreditch, and in parts of the south like parts of Wandsworth and Dulwich to some extent. There are relatively few prime and semi-prime parts of London that aren’t close to relatively bad estates. Possibly the Chelsea-South Ken-Belgravia-Mayfair continuum, although even there there are exceptions.

Interestingly, in 2011 the more spread out West London estates contributed much less to rioting than the outlying, arguably more Parisian ones in the south in Brixton/Lewisham and to the north in Tottenham.

The most politically charged question for the French far-right is, of course, repatriation. That means stripping millions (at least 6-7m in France) of people of citizenship based on ancestry and then deporting them to a third country that doesn’t want them

Is that the official platform of any French far-right party? I don't know, I'm asking. I don't know anything about French politics.

Repatriation doesn't have to be forced. It can be voluntary and financially incentivized instead. That's the platform of Patriotic Alternative in the UK, for example.

It isn't the official platform of any French far-right party that has achieved electoral success.

As for 'voluntary repatriation', Europeans imagine that it's like 'how much would I have to pay the average Greek-French to go back to Greece?' and the answer is maybe a couple hundred thousand euros or something. The calculus for the average Algerian, Senegalese, Ivorian or Malian Frenchman is completely different. Firstly, even returning to Abidjan with €200,000 isn't enough to make you an Ivorian elite by any means. Secondly, your entire extended family, corrupt local politicians and tax collectors and various other hangers-on will immediately take the money, and you know this. Then you will have no more safety net. You'd have to offer millions, even then it would be a tough choice.

It’s not analysis, it’s just making the case for mass deportation which presumably his entire readership agrees with. The objective analysis would note that, regardless of one’s personal opinion, getting to the stage where stripping people of citizenship and deporting them based on ancestry is inside the Overton window would seemingly involve a colossal shift in public attitudes toward ethnic nationalism, immigration and identity in Western European countries. In France, even collecting data on people’s race is banned, there are people of Middle Eastern and African descent in the highest offices in the land, billionaires, in business, in the arts, in almost every prominent national sports team. People’s acceptance of interracial marriage is extremely high, many French have non-native friends and coworkers.

Consider just how much of a total 180 turn in views on identity, on race and on nation would be required to get to the stage where repatriation is a widespread and popular viewpoint. Then consider that the media, state and other powerful organizations (like the EU) are institutionally opposed. There doesn’t seem to me to be a viable strategy for the far-right activist you link other than hoping the public suddenly “radicalizes”, which they didn’t do after the spate of terrorist bombings from 2001 to 2005 and again from 2011 to 2017, so it seems unlikely they’d do so now.

What do you think?

I read the Wall Street Journal and New York Times almost cover-to-cover (from politics and international to recipes and book reviews and fashion) every single day from the age of maybe 7 until I left home at 19. I also read general interest stuff like NatGeo and Scientific American every single month through my whole childhood. Then in my teenage years I was very online on tumblr, reddit, sometimes other forums. I met people from all over the world through family and in college, and since I started work I've been fortunate to meet some people who have a bunch of great stories. So I have a lot of general knowledge. I very much doubt I'm smarter, though, you've written some well-researched comments and I thought your criticism of some of the QAnon hmmposting a week or two ago was good.

But 'intelligence' is a large component in one's ability to prioritize facts to remember and use them to come up with interesting or novel points to make. And most people who are well read and know a lot across a wide domain still synthesize those facts into mediocre rationalizations of existing ideas or novel babble. On the upper end of that is a Tinkzorg, and on the lower end are internet schizos who ramble into the void. You seem to be one of the smartest mottizens imo, but it's hard to judge intelligence broadly from a single domain, there are plenty of people at the top of mathematics or science whose political opinions are still incoherent culture war stuff.

Agree that the value of a Western Europe citizenship as opposed to Sub-Saharan Africa is millions easily.

Since we're talking outlandish ideas, here's a repatriation scheme that would work: Colonies. Deport people to French-run places in Africa. Living in a French colony in Ivory Coast would not be as great as living in France but certainly miles better than being ruled by Ivorians.

What if France paid Ivory Coast to lease some of their land? It would even be a win-win for both countries. France would lose their least productive citizens, and also develop a source of cheaper labor without the attendant welfare and public safety drain. Ivory Coast would get cash as well as the economic benefit from having a region that doesn't completely suck.

This would be a public relatons disaster (and politics get affected by public relations). Colonialism looks extremely bad in the modern era regardless of the facts on the ground.

Obviously. So is repatriation. I'm just suggesting an "out there" idea that would work if people were actually on board with it. 0% chance of actually happening. Just like repatriation.

Yes, there would be a lot of details to work out in any voluntary repatriation scheme. How much money is involved, what countries are available as destinations, would those countries even accept taking people in, etc. It would be hard to come up with a package that any substantial number of people would accept. But that's sort of the whole point. Living in western Europe really is just that much better than living in these people's ancestral homelands. Which thus damages the credibility of any claims that non-whites are living under an oppressive regime of systemic racism.

It's a rhetorical gesture more than anything: "We were going to pay you to leave, but you chose to stay here of your own free will. Thus by continuing to stay here, you agree that you are fundamentally a guest in a society that belongs to us first and foremost. We're not going to actively antagonize you, but you should understand that our society is set up to cater to the interests and preferences of our native people, not yours."

I’m not French, and I don’t think that kind of deportation is at all viable. I’m also not an ethnonationalist of any real description, although for my sake I’m quite glad Israel exists.

I’m more of a believer in law and order and a fan of functioning, stable societies. I certainly don’t believe those are impossible in multicultural countries, thought they often require special effort.

and they changed nothing

It made multiculturalism less attractive for people elsewhere. It is a common talking point in Poland, with no good counter.

The Polish government, despite pretending to be tough on immigration, is charging full steam ahead into the same direction as France. There's also talk of radically loosening visa rules for countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan etc. The logic is simple. It's an aging country with very low unemployment. The voters may not like it, but the business interests don't care and the government listens to the latter. The ruling party in Poland talks a big game about not letting in "illegals" or allowing "EU refugee quotas", but they are importing tons of third worlders legally for work and the pace is just increasing.

Belgians are still split after 211 years in the same country. Northern Ireland can't overcome differences so small that the average western European would have difficulties telling them apart. Czechs and Slovaks couldn't function together. Turks and Kurds have tried for a millennia. Sri Lanka had major terrorist attacks committed by people whose ancestors came there during Charlemagne's lifetime. Sunni and Shia arabs have spent 1400 years fighting over a minute doctrinal difference and the conflict is so infected that some believe it is a divine will to exterminate the other. Russia has tried to integrate Chechens for centuries. 70 years of Soviet propaganda washed off in a few years.

People are wildly optimistic concerning integration. While most people realize that they would not become Ugandan by taking a language course or reading about Ugandan values, people assume that Ugandans can become middle class westerners simply by being informed. There is a deep underlying Chauvinism behind the western view of assimilation. It is simply assumed that our way of life is superior and once the barbarians have been instructed in our superior ways they will adopt them. Meanwhile, the west is busy deconstructing the same "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" that we are bewildered that the migrants don't adopt.

Integration is exceedingly difficult, takes multiple generations, and often doesn't occur at all. The lack of miracles is not failure. France has succeeded far beyond Syria, Mexico with its natives revolting, Kashmir or Ukraine.

I honestly think much of the debate is driven by wishful thinking caused by the fear of accepting that the multicultural project won't work.

The USA assimilated most white immigrants quite well given enough time. France assimilated its fairly diverse white cultures over centuries (like the south and Bretons in the west). China took manifold Chinese peoples and turned them mostly into "Han". A similar process is occurring in India right now with Hindu Nationalism.

While pessimism is warranted towards assimilation in general, blanket pessimism is not. Assimilation can happen faster or slower given certain characteristics. Two big ones that make assimilation much harder are:

  • Differing religions. Religions evolved to be sticky and xenophobic towards other faiths. The total impact depends largely on how much conflict there are between the religions, e.g. Catholic vs Protestant used to be a huge faultline, but now its almost irrelevant in many places.

  • Obvious physical characteristics that can be used as a proxy for lower socioeconomic status. Think blacks in the USA, whose skin color marked them as lower-class. Anyone who isn't delusional will then use skin color as a shorthand for "poor", and take all ordinary precautions one would normally take with poor people, e.g. seeing them as more lazy, more crime prone, etc.

It is simply assumed that our way of life is superior and once the barbarians have been instructed in our superior ways they will adopt them

This assumption was largely correct and as long as it was correct, assimilation happened relatively quite successfully.

It is not so correct anymore so you see an increasing number of cracks in the system. There is not much more to it.

And yet people who came to the US voluntarily as settlers and not asylum seekers integrated themselves just fine, even when they came as huddled masses. If you keep stirring, your sauce emulsifies just fine. The French state used to stir hard and actually blended most of the local ethnicities into the French nation. It could've done the same to the Algerians: ban the use of Arabic, force the migrants to take French names, break up and resettle any ethnic enclaves.

There was no assimilation. The decline of WASP-majority American institutions had a profoundly damaging and destabilizing impact on American political and economic life. Entire cities like Boston and Philadelphia were lost wholesale to the Irish and Italians. We can't imagine an America where the European population remained 70% Anglo, but it would certainly be a very different place.

The decline of WASP-majority American institutions had a profoundly damaging and destabilizing impact on American political and economic life. Entire cities like Boston and Philadelphia were lost wholesale to the Irish and Italians.

Oh, yes, I remember reading about the terrible places that Boston and Philadelphia have become after being invaded by the Catholics and the Jews. /s

What exactly went wrong with Boston and Philly? Bossism? I wouldn't lay the blame solely at the Catholic feet. William Tweed, arguably the most notorious political boss, was a Scottish Quaker,

I’m not saying they got “worse”, clearly by many metrics (not least GDP/capita) America is much better than it was in 1840. But it is different. The Irish and Italians did not become Anglos, they didn’t become English or Scots-Irish or whatever. They established their own communities that slowly blended together with other white ethnics and the pre-existing (largely British) cultures in the US which itself over time gave way to modern American identity and culture. The social fabric that once existed disappeared, it was its own culture war at the end of the 19th century, the people of the time saw it happening, they lamented it. It was damaging in the sense that the old culture of those cities ceased to exist, vanished no less surely than the culture of Ottoman Greeks or German Ostsiedler. And sure, the presence of European immigrants in urban organized crime in the early 20th century was obviously substantial.

That the largely new country, new nation that adopted the name and flag and constitution of the USA ended up being wealthy and powerful and generally a good place to live is indeed fortunate, but it doesn’t mean the old America did not fade away.

Irish and Italian Americans never assimilated? How do you propose we measure assimilation, and what groups do you think have assimilated that the Irish and Italians fall short of?

They have “assimilated” in the sense of intermarriage (by this measure Brazil’s the all-time greatest success of diversity), but they didn’t adopt Anglo culture, they changed it to accommodate many of their own mores, habits and ideas.

Wait, so fourth generation Americans in Boston who add a lilt to their voices as they get drunker are actually just Irish because they don't pointedly refuse to talk about their divorces and put jam on their peanut butter sandwiches instead of marshmallow fluff?

Yet race is a constant major topic in the US that hasn't been solved despite decades of trying. There are vast differences in outcome, there is high level of segregation, there are large differences in crime. What would even be the point of removing all Algerian elements from Algerians? Why go through a massive social engineering process to try to strip people of their culture?

Why go through a massive social engineering process to try to strip people of their culture?

Social harmony, of course. And the US doesn't have a problem with race, it has a problem with the descendants of slaves. Their arrival wasn't voluntary, so it's not surprising their segregation was able to prevent successful assimilation.

Right, and even in Singapore - for all the state’s attempts to force integration - the government has tried very hard to maintain a Chinese majority. You can’t work miracles, at best you can pacify groups of violent young men by making the authorities appropriately scary. That’s probably the last thing France has yet to try, but there are complications there, too, as the current riots show.

Meanwhile, the west is busy deconstructing the same "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" that we are bewildered that the migrants don't adopt.

This doesn't look right to me. The people deconstructing "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" aren't bewildered at the fact that migrants aren't becoming devoted Christians, but the fact that they aren't becoming secular feminist progressives.

Well sure, because secular feminist progressives probably aren’t even a majority of native French.

Twitter's been acting weird for several hours. Turns out that Musk has done something extraordinary:

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

  • Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
  • Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
  • New unverified accounts to 300/day

Of course everyone on Twitter knows that 600 posts/day is basically nothing, so it's basically something to get people to pay for Twitter and get that blue check, but even then it's not an unlimited offer.

Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?

Twitter seems to be working adequately for me today where yesterday I got rate limited right away. Anyone else have similar experiences?

Yes, I found the rate limit on Saturday and then not again.

4D chess theory:

Elon is trying to teach the western internet users about the current Electricity situation in South Africa

Interestingly even the South Africans protect the internet / ISPs and cell towers from load shedding.

These measures would be extremely, two orders of magnitude, too harsh for a well-run social media site responding to scraping. Twitter doesn't have it any worse than every other site, and they accept some scraping and can identify bots and ratelimit excessive load. Limiting most of twitter's real users to just half an hour of use per day is absurd, I can't think of any situation that would call for it.

(roughly) For scraping to really harm twitter this much, it'd have to be significantly higher-load than twitter's real users as a whole. And requests = (requests/users) * users, so if all requests are from authenticated users (after login wall but before this) and scrape_requests >> real_requests, either the scrapers are making many more requests than real users per user (in which case a much less strict limit works), or there are many more scraping users than real users - very unlikely because creating accounts is hard (maybe requiring unique phone numbers), because it wasn't 'no ratelimit for accounts created before 2020', and because that many bot accounts would be noticed and could be distinguished from real users.

If it's just covering for an outage ... that'd be a 12-hour long outage at this point. When Facebook has an outage, let alone a 12-hour long one, they don't lie about the cause and only communicate it via the totally-not-CEO's personal account on the site with the outage. Twitter's status page is still green.

What must Tucker on Twitter be thinking now, or anyone else in or contemplating a professional relationship with twitter? The advertisers they're trying to court? The $1000/mo gold checkmark holders?

I have no good explanation for this decision. (edit: to be clear - if the real reason is scraping, the poor technical decisionmaking - otherwise, the decision to cover for an internal issue by pretending the issue is scraping). Maybe Elon's really on drugs? He put someone incompetent in charge who's feeding him bad information? The deadline for the Google Cloud bill they weren't paying was June 30, i.e. yesterday - supposedly they restarted payments, but maybe they didn't really? Maybe firing so much of Twitter plus all the changes he's made led to a buildup of problems, and this is what he had to do to keep twitter up for now? Idk. Either way, this is a much more significant failure than any of Twitter 2's previous missteps, which still could be explained as part of a high-variance strategy. Burning the credibility of verified, boosting shitty paid replies ... eh, it's bringing in money. Not paying bills ... aggressive approach dealmaking. This is just gross incompetence no matter the explanation.

And, "put any Fortune 500 CEO in charge of America and it'll immediately improve" ... feeling even worse than it did a year ago

Have you read any interviews or heard anyone talk about the twitter code base? It's supposed to be a mess... In the process of trying to fix things, would stuff like this happen, a lot?

It's funny that just about the worst possible assumptions are made because vice said musk bad.

so I've seen rumors around, and keep in mind these are just rumors, from HN and others that Twitter has been accidentally DDoSing themselves.

in the Twitter UI as of a few days ago (and earlier while looking for more information on a related thing I accidentally confirmed this), it'd start making hundreds of requests per minute to Twitter's servers. now looking through it, I found this

This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

[...]

https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057

obviously my source is pretty biased, but the self-request spam seems to at least be happening to some extent.

I strongly suspect that, while this happened, it isn't a significant cause of the ratelimits. I also do not have good information though.

The login wall was implemented within a day or so of the ratelimit suggests they have shared causes. I don't think the login wall caused the request spam, just the ratelimit - implying that the login wall couldn't have been caused by the ratelimit. And I think the ratelimit was intentionally imposed.

Also, if that was a primary cause - they've now fixed the request spam, why haven't they removed the ratelimit?

I also think (could be wrong vague memory) the request spam was a bug that existed on twitter months back when one was ratelimited (by the old anti spambot ratelimits that were 100x higher)

it's time for a new subscription service -- Twitter Brown, where you get to see all of the tweets. only $12/month

this is getting ridiculous. there has to be a better way than this

I'll be concerned if these limits last longer than a couple of days. I doubt the GCP stuff is related (even the article you link connects it to Twitter Trust & Safety while this outage is affecting Twitter's core infra). FWIW Twitter seems fine for me now. It was severely degraded for a few hours on both app and web earlier but looks to have improved. I suspect someone fucked up deploying the new login-wall and they're running damage control, and possibly using the situation to run some experiments (or as leverage for their negotiations with API customers). This is the first major service interruption since Musk's takeover and (unless it persists!) I really think you're catastrophizing too much. I mean, Reddit was completely unusable for several days just a couple of weeks ago (though that was due to managerial incompetence rather than technical); 12 hours of degraded service is a bad look for a major tech company but hardly apocalyptic like you seem to imply.

FWIW Twitter seems fine for me now. It was severely degraded for a few hours on both app and web earlier but looks to have improved

If the rate limit is covering for the outage / GCP / etc, 'the rate limit still existing' means the issue is still ongoing because Twitter's still losing money

12 hours of degraded service is a bad look for a major tech company but hardly apocalyptic like you seem to imply

I agree, should've made that clearer - a 12 or 24-hour outage is bad, but not unprecedented, tech is incredibly complicated and it can happen without any mistakes on Elon's part. Facebook was down for 24 hours in 2019, Roblox was down for three days at some point, etc. The very-bad part is that it's either totally unnecessary (combatting scraping) or they're lying about it (internal outage, GCP issue, etc). When Facebook has a long outage, they have clear updates on the status page every hour. Again, imagine you financially depend on Twitter, just got ratelimited, and now have to look at screenshots of Elon's tweets and guess if he's being honest or not, guess when the ratelimits are disappearing, etc.

And the weirdness of the cause, unfortunately, significantly increases the likelihood of the rate limit persisting.

updates:

It gets better

Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675260424109928449

all within the span of a few hours

I saw someone semi-jokingly say that the rate limits were increasing as Elon ran into them himself, and at this point I find that distressingly likely.

Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars, though a more based Twitter is still nice to have.

Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars

Consider the idea that he's not actually running the rockets and electric cars any better...

I can't see how SpaceX is anything but an unqualified success in every single way.

As soon as Starship is flying, Musk will have achieved every single goal he had short of the Mars colony, which is likely to happen when the reduced launch costs make it cheap enough for governments beginning to wake up to a space race.

Tesla could be run better, but it's still highly successful and has absolutely achieved Musk's vision of democratizing electric cars, and even if other companies overtake it, they're doing so by adopting the technology themselves.

God damn Starship is going to revolutionize everything. I can't wait.

Same gentleman's bet offer I made to self_made_human: care to make any guesses as to when we see it in orbit? I'll be more than happy to take the opposite side of it.

Me neither. It would be hella funny if the Artemis astronauts struggled to land on the moon and found a whole platoon of SpaceX people waiting there with airport placards and another tesla roadster haha

This.

We're living in a world where SpaceX has become the standard to beat for commercial sattelite launches and Ford EV's are licensing Tesla batteries and charging tech. If this is Musk "screwing up" what does "success" look like?

Well, what I'm saying is Elon's companies are part-bubble, and part promises he'll never fulfill. Something being a bubble doesn't mean stuff isn't getting done, failure is more a question of sustainability. For unfulfillable promises it's more obvious - success is when he actually fulfills them.

Frankly I find Musk to be one of the strongest reasons to doubt general intelligence (which I still believe in). The man is super-effective at running his core enterprises, people who deny SpaceX and Tesla's results seem to me to be in denial of overwhelming evidence. This doesn't stop him from being a goof with terrible takes and a streak of very bad calls, including this whole Twitter nonsense.

I can't see how SpaceX is anything but an unqualified success in every single way.

If it's a hype bubble, you're not going to see how it's a failure until it crashes.

As soon as Starship is flying

Yeah... that's a big if. Care to take a guess when we might see it in orbit? I'll be happy to take the "no it won't" side of that prediction.

My 50% confidence interval is within this year, and 70% within 2 years and 90% within 3 years for the first successful orbital flight and return for a Starship. I haven't actually checked further launch plans before writing this, but I think I can still hold myself to this.

Frankly speaking, I don't see any reason to be anything but bullish on SpaceX. Even if Elon was eaten by a wild doge today, the company has already revolutionized space travel, reusable rockets were as outlandish as fusion power for fucking forever. Starlink is profitable, and even the humble Falcon and Falcon Heavy have made lunar exploration feasible on post-Cold War budgets.

My 50% confidence interval is within this year, and 70% within 2 years and 90% within 3 years for the first successful orbital flight and return for a Starship.

Ok, I'm going "no way" on all 3. The one in 3 years might surprise me, but for the sake of simplicity I'll round it down to "not going to happen". And I'm talking about simply going to orbit, if it successfully lands, I'll be shocked.

reusable rockets were as outlandish as fusion power for fucking forever

That's just not true. Others will point out that the actual innovative thing is making reusability cost-effective. We've seen reusability as a "mere" technical feat working for decades in the form of Space Shuttle.

Starlink is profitable

Is it? I seem to remember a leaked email where Elon was complaining about Starlink's financials.

That's just not true. Others will point out that the actual innovative thing is making reusability cost-effective.

Are you serious? The only example in the entire history of rocketry of cost effective reusable rockets is SpaceX's Falcon 9. Other companies have caught up after 10 years by copying their design. If anyone can do it, it's Gwynn Shotwell.

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Well, the whole crux of the issue is making reusability profitable! That's what people really mean by that statement, or at least I do.

You can make the claim that fusion power exists today, except it costs more to get energy than you can sell it for. But nobody claims that we've "got" fusion power do they?

The Space Shuttle was a flying white elephant swollen with pork, too compromised from it's original vision to satisfy anyone except horny Texan senators. Same deal with SLS, though it doesn't even pretend to be reusable. It would be cheaper to fuel the Starship with dollar bills or just pile them to the Moon (this is hyperbole).

Is it? I seem to remember a leaked email where Elon was complaining about Starlink's financials.

I find such a claim dubious, and it's more likely Elon kvetching even if it's true.

It is such a stunningly superior product to any other orbital internet provider that it's ludicrous. And they have massive positive feedback from the experience curve of having so many launches on hardware they own.

It's not like anyone is forcing them to do it, if it wasn't profitable or on the road to profit with massive growth they simply wouldn't do it.

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Tesla is worth over 800 billion so he has certainly done something right there. To your point it is pretty crazy that the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world is a full blown/terminally online twitter addict.

No I think this makes sense. The thing he did right was hype. With hype he attracted people good enough at the actual work to make a functional company, and enough funding to get it of the ground. At least functional enough to generate more hype. But 90% of what he personally is doing right is the hype. He has a ton of projects that didn't really go anywhere, but did generate even more hype, like hyperloop (heh. Hype-rloop). So of course he's terminally on Twitter. He's a PR CEO. He does Hype and Culture War and it makes his stock increase in value.

I'm not going to say he's a bad CEO in the getting funding and making his stock value rise sense. I'm not even going to say his pure Hype strategy hasn't been working, it's been causing all sorts of forces to gas him up like a DND deity powered by faith. But like- he's casting with Charisma, not Int. If his company is really worth 800 billion, its because he can be expected to generate enough hype to get other people to pump energy into his ideas until they become reality- I don't think it would be worth that in anyone else's hands though.

It's not that crazy, considering that the US already had a full blown Twitter addict as a President.

Tesla is worth over 800 billion so he has certainly done something right there.

That's actually an argument against him. There's no way Tesla is worth more than all other car companies combined.

So how much money have you lost shorting Tesla for years at this point?

I think Tesla’s valuation is high because (1) they do have a reasonably high margin car department, (2) they basically now have a national gas station chain as all other electric vehicles are using the Tesla charging stations, and (3) the hope that Tesla can solve battery storage turning them into the world’s largest utility by far.

The valuation obviously is based off of hope, but there is real substance and actual profit. Elon built a car company in the 21st century. People thought that impossible. Maybe we don’t assume he is an idiot?

There is very much a way because thats currently what it is.

Are you saying Elon is a bad CEO because the market places such a high valuation on Tesla?

There is very much a way because thats currently what it is.

Nah, stock market prices can get wild, and end up not indicative of actual value of the company.

Are you saying Elon is a bad CEO because the market places such a high valuation on Tesla?

Not directly, but sort of yes. It's more that when a company's valuation is so out of whack with it's fundamentals, it's a good indication the company is running on pure hype, and when that happens it's not uncommon for companies to crash and burn when the hype runs out.

SpaceX succeded with things where many others failed, did things considered basically impossible and Musk's takes on spaceflight seems to make more sense.

Maybe simply "disregard common opinion, order company to do weird stuff because you thing that it is a good idea and double down on everything" worked in case of SpaceX and imploded in case of Twitter? After all such strategy cannot work every time?

Or Musk started to believe fanboys, thinks he is smarter than God himself and stopped listening to others? Or is surrounded by bunch of sycophants?

Or for Twitter there is no way for profitability and task is impossible and Musk flails trying to achieve it?

A big part of it is Musk blew the first critical step in doing a leveraged buyout when he substantially overpaid for Twitter. He took a company that was losing money and added a ~$1 Billion interest payment it had to make every year. He had to do something drastic to make it more profitable than it ever has been. A typical LBO is done by private equity with a clear plan to do that but I think Elon mostly wanted to buy Twitter as a fun mildly money losing toy when Tesla stock was at an all time high and then tried to back out when the price of both collapsed.

SpaceX succeded with things where many others failed, did things considered basically impossible and Musk's takes on spaceflight seems to make more sense.

What was that, reusability? Other people have done it, the only question is whether it makes sense. People always point to how much the costs to orbit have fallen, but I'm not sure I buy it's because of reusability. He also does some interesting things with accounting, like overcharging governments by 2-3 times, and with that I wonder if the private launches aren't just subsidized by government contracts.

Maybe simply "disregard common opinion, order company to do weird stuff because you thing that it is a good idea and double down on everything" worked in case of SpaceX and imploded in case of Twitter? After all such strategy cannot work every time?

Of all the companies I would have expected it to work, it was Twitter. There's no way they needed all the people they were hiring, so trimming the fat was a good move. Alternative sources of funding like Blue, and letting people put tweets behind a paywall was a pretty good idea. Maybe it was the advertiser boycott, maybe Twitter was in a lot worse shape at the time of purchase than anyone let on, but as good as his initial ideas were, it seems they're not enough.

Maybe it was the advertiser boycott, maybe Twitter was in a lot worse shape at the time of purchase than anyone let on, but as good as his initial ideas were, it seems they're not enough.

As someone with a slight amount of tech knowledge (10 years of experience) my reading of the situation was that he was totally correct that there was a lot of fat that needed to be cut - but the problem was that the fat was heavily contributing to keeping twitter on one side of the culture war even as they let technical debt accumulate to absurd levels. He is facing an avalanche of negative press and stories because not only has he threatened to make Twitter a place where dissenting opinions can exist at all, but also because he just made a whole swathe of social justice jobs evaporate. Even if they don't get explicit about it, I believe that activists understand on a basic level that someone demonstrating you don't need to pay their cultural commissars in money or do-nothing sinecures is a real, serious threat to their movement and way of life. If you're a diversity officer who helps people deal with micro-aggressions at Meta, you REALLY don't want to see Elon fire everyone with a job that looks remotely like yours and then have the company do better as a result - so you lean on the advertisers and government connections, make sure the legacy media savages them, make them an acceptable target for mockery, etc.

He also does some interesting things with accounting, like overcharging governments by 2-3 times, and with that I wonder if the private launches aren't just subsidized by government contracts.

The problem with this argument is that SpaceX still charges the government significantly less than ULA (i.e. Lockheed and Boeing) do.

What was that, reusability?

Yes. Or more specifically, reusability that reduces costs unlike space shuttle failed attempt.

And some smaller changes that resulted in overall reduced costs.

Starting and running private company building brand new rocket is also really unique achievement. Also human spaceflight as private profitable company.

Other people have done it

Not in way that makes sense. Space shuttle was a major prior attempt and ended more expensive than disposable rockets.

He also does some interesting things with accounting, like overcharging governments by 2-3 times

Well, they still launch cheaper than competition or launch at all. It is hard to say how much overcharging is here, given that almost all activity in this space is governmental.

Of all the companies I would have expected it to work, it was Twitter.

There is possibility that Twitter was fundamentally unprofitable or that Musk is worse fit, or that he started to believe that he is perfect and makes no mistakes.

Yes. Or more specifically, reusability that reduces costs unlike space shuttle failed attempt.

Is there an official breakdown of costs on Falcon 9, showing that they are actually saving money on reusability?

Not aware of anything so detailed (and would be happy to read it!) though not saving on that just means that they managed to

  • find savings elsewhere
  • hide actual saving source

In theory they may run with the same rocket costs and less bloated company and/or less outrageous profits than ULA etc, but it also would be impressive.

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I feel like all of the above applies in the case of Twitter.

Damn that's actually a scary point. Not just for the rocket/car users themselves but also for the rest of humanity considering that he's 100% the best in those areas at the moment.

Consider that, this too, is not the case.

Look, I appreciate the ethos Musk represents, but that's also the main reason I'm so critical of him. If this guy crashes and burns, which I find likely, the ideas he represents are going to get discredited.

As long as the rockets continue to fly, and land, and the competitors continue to largely not do that, or do that plainly worse, at some point you're asking me to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes.

I don't believe in ideas, I believe in dollars per kg to orbit.

All I'm asking for is some skepticism of his accounting, surely that's not too much of a stretch?

It is a bigger and bigger stretch as time goes on. If SpaceX were losing money on each commercial flight, you would expect them to minimize the number of those flights and attempt to maximize the number of government flights. Instead, they are turning down almost no commercial partners and have increased launch cadence every year, to the point that they are putting more commercial tons into orbit than everyone else in the world combined, and growing. This would not make sense if it were not profitable for them. You believe they are burning investor capital to do this...why, exactly?

The government overcharge theory doesn't make sense either, because even if they are inflating their bids, they are still beating all competitors and managing to deliver. They could only do this if their costs are unusually low by industry standards. But if that is true, then it is also true that their commercial costs world be lower, so the lower price for those would also be profitable.

The more parsimonious explanation is just that their costs actually are lower, which makes them more profitable at market clearing prices and enables then to discount the market price without losing money.

More comments

does reading a post mean viewing the timeline , refreshing it, or clicking a tweet and reading it individually? it is possible to read posts in many ways.

twitter seemed to work so well from 2010-2022 and then all a sudden it doesn't

Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?

no, not the death at all. it is to test the waters on this idea. if it fails to generate enough verification signups, he will abandon it. also, it helps generate free press about the site being down

twitter seemed to work so well from 2010-2022

AFAIK Twitter was not profitable overall in that time. Running nice to users unprofitable website is much easier than running one that gets enough income/donations.

Twitter would be profitable now (and indeed he could have fired fewer engineers) if he had kept his mouth shut after acquisition, calmed the advertisers down and just kept the ship afloat.

Elon’s dumb move was firing 75% of staff and then also losing half the advertisers, such that even the former could not make the company profitable.

He lost the advertisers because Twitter wasn't really selling advertising. They were providing control of the social commons through their "Trust and Safety" censorship policies. The payment for this was in the form of advertising dollars. If he'd done what the "advertisers" wanted, he'd have to continue with the policies that he bought the company in order to end.

He didn't have to continue with the policy at all, he only had to gesture toward it. If he'd been overtly supportive while quietly implementing exactly the same speech policies he has, while not tweeting much himself and putting out the occasional corporate press release with the right words, he'd be fine. Advertisers don't care about policy, but they do care about the appearance of policy. Kind of like how Trump would have had a much easier time passing his plans through congress if he hadn't tried to claim they were actually much more radical than they were.

As I said, these aren't really "advertisers", these are ideologues using advertising dollars to pay for control of the social commons. They do care about results.

does reading a post mean viewing the timeline , refreshing it, or clicking a tweet and reading it individually? it is possible to read posts in many ways.

from what I understand, the answer seems to be yes. also all the replies appear to be included.

I understand the principle of experimentation and generating buzz. But there's experimentation and then there's setting yourself on fire to see what happens.

it depends how long it stays broken. i am sure if he wanted he could revert twitter to how it was yesterday

This is good for crypto Twitter. We will poast less and shame people for mid poasts, this will usher in a Twitter Renaissance!

Just kidding. I'm absolutely sure there's no 4D chess behind it all; maybe he's balancing his KPI obsession with actual, transient infrastructure problems and his spite for OpenAI, but that's the extent of it. The funniest part is that Twitter has a CEO (what's her name?), but apparently Musk still decides this unilaterally, in the fashion of Putin-Medvedev «castling».

On the plus side, I'll probably be spending more time here.

My old faithful Reddit app died, Twitter is being a bitch both through rate limiting and blocking access from unregistered users. If it wasn't for The Motte I'd have to stop doomscrolling and do something productive, shudder.

We're always here for you. Don't worry.

Luckily the Motte only provides like 1-2 hours of scrolling per day, max. At least for me.

Guys! There is a simple explanation for this that explains everything:

This is an outage. Twitter's load balancers or whatever are fucked and they can serve a small percentage of typical traffic. This is damage control, i guess to avoid acknowleging an outage?

It feels likely this is in some way related to twitter not paying their google cloud builds as has been reported by various sources.

deleted

so trying to put up a login window caused them to nuke their servers? very impressive.

I happen to think your correct but I wonder why they don’t just admit it?

Apparently it’s because of their new login wall, so their own stupidity caused it.

Because it might naturally lead to questions like "Has Musk known what he's doing or had any plan at any point of this whole ordeal?"

Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing?

  1. The site has never been profitable.

  2. Musk bought at a major premium he needs to pay off

  3. (Maybe?) Tesla is likely going to face more competition moving forward so it's worrisome that the Twitter debt is tie to Tesla stock.

  4. Musk is panicking and throwing whatever he can at the wall.

twitter has a positive ROI indirectly by affecting elections and sentiment in musk's favor, which benefits tesla, spacex , and his other companies.

Yup. Twitter is the "town square" of the internet - or at least it was until these latest disasters. It confers social capital that cannot be measured in a balance sheet to whoever controls it.

It confers social capital that cannot be measured in a balance sheet to whoever controls it.

I mean, that's almost trivially true. But that doesn't actually mean that it provides enough of a benefit to make any payments on the purchase less biting, especially given the overpayment.

I can buy the recent argument that things like the Bud Light and Target boycotts or the success of the rerelease of What is a Woman all trace back to Musk taking over Twitter - and that's a hard to quantify bonus for conservative culture warring.

But that's just the public good problem: it may be good for Matt Walsh and co. to be able to get the head of a major tech company on speed-dial to help push their causes.

But they're not the ones paying for it

Surely it's all about the site's contents as AI training data. This and the Reddit shit. It's silly to try to discuss this with that unmentioned or as an afterthought.

both in this and reddit's case, it's an obvious cop out. the people using training data on reddit have access to the entire corpus from 2005-2022 via torrent, and it's probably way more clean than any future data

but most notably of all, the corpus of reddit contains a lot of spam, and when I say a lot I mean it. it was amazing how much is just completely unmoderated spam on there.

in twitter's case, I don't buy it either. I guess maybe pre-2022 but it's like the best data has probably been already scraped

Why would he destroy the site just to prevent AI data scraping? This is like if KFC decided to only sell unseasoned chicken in order to keep Bojangles from stealing the 11 herbs and spices.

How many tokens are in Twitter? How many new ones are generated per day? What proportion are they of humanity's total output? What are they worth?

It's not much when naively calculated, but we're learning over the last few months that you get vastly more bang for buck out of high-quality datasets, to the extent that you can match models 1000x bigger and trained on 20x more data if you just get real good tokens. And in terms of both quality and especially recency, Twitter is unmatched, I believe. If you want a model that knows not only that there's a war going on in Ukraine but how it's going, you'll have to scrape Twitter.

That said I don't believe Musk knows or cares about that, seems like they just have problems paying the bill for their infra. Sounds insane I know.

Why don't you believe Musk knows or cares about that? There's extensive evidence that he's extremely AI pilled.

I haven't seen enough evidence or skepticism on display to fully buy into the Google Cloud claim (or any of the other just-desserts infrastructure stories), especially against the motivations and track records at play.

This seems to be the only source that ever reported anything about it:

Weekend scoop with @ZoeSchiffer for subscribers: Twitter is stiffing Google on its payments for Google Cloud, and significant parts of the company’s trust and safety infrastructure could collapse by the end of the month

I noticed some Musk replies in the ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster like 2 weeks ago, but this is still pretty esoteric stuff and he's presumably a busy man. In any case, I am not convinced these measures are effective at all.

If you're trying to determine how close he is to culture where that kind of thing in general is common knowledge: even ignoring the high-tier practitioners he employs and presumably has reasonably technical discussions with, I've been reading his /with_replies on and off for a year and am reasonably confident he's been lurking around the "ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster" since at least December and probably before.

If you're trying to determine whether he is aware of that research specifically, I don't think it matters enough to modulate his reasonably well-evidenced sense of considerable AI-training worth in Twitter's content.

And whether or not the measures are being perfectly effective this early on is orthogonal to any explanation for taking them, whether token-hoarding or infrastructure-comeuppance.

I can't see any mainstream social media site besides reddit being valuable for AI training data. Twitter isn't longform enough.

This is the first change that is actually going to majorly impact my Twitter use. Only being able to load 600 posts a day is about 5 minutes of activity on Twitter. There’s so many replies that get loaded every time you click on a tweet, and even refreshing your timeline probably results in loading several hundred. Even the paying users will be severely throttled. Between this and Apollo for Reddit shutting down today, I might have a lot more free time!

Does Twitter not do infinite scrolling for you? Whenever I am baited into clicking a post, it only loads like 20 replies max unless I am foolish enough to scroll down farther than that.

For some anecdata, I guess I am what you would call an unverified registered user, and have noticed no change in my (regrettable enough as it is) use case.

Have you considered that you might be spending too much time on Twitter if this is a problem for you?

This is wild and evidence that Twitter's ad revenue has fallen by a lot.

Which, if true, also means that advertising on Twitter has little measurable benefit. Why? Because if Twitter advertising could deliver measurable, immediate value, someone would advertise.

In less than 1 year, Elon has proved the following theories correct:

  • Most jobs are useless

  • Most advertising is useless

4D chess at its finest /s

huge, deep-pocked advertisers such as IBM do not really care about ROI or benefit, but rather just want to spread awareness, like about IBM and its Watson program. however, those are also the type of advertisers most averse to risk and may not wish to be associated with Elon

Yes, agree. But given that Twitter laid off 75-90% of staff and also stopped paying bills, costs must be down hugely. Therefore, if they still aren't making money, the price of ads has also fallen off a cliff.

Let's say that, pre-Elon, they got $1 per unit of hand-wavy awareness campaigns. It's possible that now they get $0.10 per unit of actual measurable performance ads. The loss of the hand-wavy shit really hurts because ads don't really work.

Related:

https://archive.is/yBS9E

"When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?"

Trigger warning: Boomer-tier mainstream media

Is it known whether the loans are fixed rate? If they aren't, costs are presumably also going up as the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates to fight inflation.

Most LBO debt (which this is) is floating rate.

LBOs need to have optional principal payments because they don't know if the company will make enough free cash flow to make principal payments on the debt. Fixed rate debt with a prepayment option is a nightmare for banks to price and risk manage (see SVB passim, or the S&L crisis for an earlier example - LBO debt would be even worse than mortgages because there isn't the huge volume of historical prepayment data) so it tends to be expensive. And private equity firms have the necessary skills and market access to manage their own interest rate risk with derivatives. Most (but by no means all) LBO loan covenants require the borrower to buy an interest rate cap which protects itself (and thus indirectly the lenders) from big interest rate rise.

To be fair, Musk-owned Twitter is exactly the sort of organisation that would "forget" to buy the cap, and it turned out to be a working assumption among Musk-aligned right-wing VCs that they were bailout-eligible.

I think most "big" loans are fixed rate. You want the cost/cashflow to be predictable.

marketing for these big companies seems like a billion dollar red queen's race. obviously some advertising needs to exist, but it feels like a massive human inefficiency that there are ads everywhere.

Because if Twitter advertising could deliver measurable, immediate value, someone would advertise.

Web advertising is patronage, not about measurable outcomes.. Once twitter slipped from the grasp of the managerial regime, the advertisers were told to back off.

All the old big company ads disappeared after the the takeover, and some large companies came back months later, but in a greatly diminished number.

Do you truly think Raytheon ads on MSNBC, ads by a company which doesn't sell anything civilians can buy, is using ads as anything but patronage?

Most web advertising is for products or services you can purchase, though. And there are so many different products for accurately measuring the effect of your ad spend. This seems facially false.

Most web advertising is for products or services you can purchase, though

I've read accounts claiming online advertising is mostly a sham. That is, there are really little reliable metrics, all the power is in the hands of those selling the ads, etc.

I may post about it if I find the relevant write-up.

Most web advertising is for products or services you can purchase, though

That someone can purchase. I've been on twitter for years. I'd estimate maybe 5% of ads I saw were ever relevant - most were irrelevant trash. I mean, job offers for software devs? It's hard to tell how bad their ad targetting was.

Rest complete trash I'd not even glance at or would block immediately like say, ads for Pepsi.

Facebook seems slightly less bad at showing irrelevant stuff, but it hasn't even figured out that as a far-right type I'm not going to buy liquid food substitutes. So online ads are really kind of meh, if even supposedly some of the best companies cannot figure out how to target ads.

I've read accounts claiming online advertising is mostly a sham. That is, there are really little reliable metrics, all the power is in the hands of those selling the ads, etc.

Note that the following is a much worse argument than it should be - I should just go through a big advertising product's offerings here and explain how they work.

Advertising is a massive industry. I don't doubt this is true for some buyers and sellers in some areas, but others effectively measure the impacts of ad spend. Teams put a lot of effort from very intelligent people into measuring it, and from what I have seen it works well.

Examples to consider: Some google search terms are much more expensive to advertise on than others. Why? Well, they're terms like 'Insurance', 'loans', 'mortgage', 'attorney', where people are looking to purchase expensive services. How would that price be maintained if they didn't work?

Another example: Multiple small online business owners have told me that advertisements get them most of their customers.

That someone can purchase. I've been on twitter for years. I'd estimate maybe 5% of ads I saw were ever relevant - most were irrelevant trash

Twitter's advertising has always been terrible (i i r c), I'm referring to internet advertising in general.

but it hasn't even figured out that as a far-right type I'm not going to buy liquid food substitutes

You may also just be in a hard-to-target demographic, most of us are outliers. I have never intentionally clicked and will never intentionally click on an ad unless I'm investigating advertising itself, and whenever I notice an ad for a product I think 'this is trying to manipulate me ... I better be extra sure to never buy this!', I use ublock origin, half the sites I spend a lot of time on have no ads, I'm not interested in almost all advertised products, and the weirdness of my internet habits mans ads are poorly targeted at me. If advertising was like that for everyone, very little about the ad industry would be recognizable. But most people are not like that.

I agree!

"We need all these employees for X, Y, Z reason" - FALSE!

"We spend all this money on advertising because it works" - ALSO FALSE!

So proveth Elon the Shatterer of Sacred Myths. (For the record I believe that Elon is not playing 4d chess here and is just shooting from the hip with poor results).

I don't understand the logic at all, it seems like it would cost a lot of ad revenue to throttle user engagement that much. But maybe ad revenue is so low that anything he can do to juice subscriptions is good? Though once you cut low follower engagement by demanding a subscription then it stops becoming a good promotional platform for power users and they use it less which it makes less attractive to subscribers and the death spiral starts.

power users are not going to be deterred by some downtime

This is insane. I haven't used Twitter for awhile and forgot my previous username, so I created a new twitter account and infinite scrolled for about 20 seconds and I hit the read-limit and got rate limited. The entire website went blank. What is he trying to accomplish here? Save on infrastructure costs? I don't remember another website trying anything like this.

Also why start this on the weekend? I imagine the poor engineering oncalls will start getting paged about massive egress and engagement drops, possibly split by each individual product pillar. It's not like this decision was leaked beforehand, so I don't believe it was widely communicated across the company. Basically, chaos.

I predict a walk-back within hours or days.

Since he stated "temporary limits", a walkback would be very easy to do, but it's still just evidence that the whole site's basically hostage to a capricious weirdo.

One theory I saw that it's the first day of the month and some ISPs are finally starting to pull the plug.

As Musk is a certified Very Smart Man^tm (IT must be true, a verified dude in his truck wearing sunglasses told me so!) I bet it's actually a legitimate hail marry attempt to get some money out of the site.

This is based purely on vibes because the MuskMan clearly wakes up and throws the bones to determine all his choices for the day eg. challenging a reptilian to a wrestling match before getting his card pulled by his mother.

As Musk is a certified Very Smart Man^tm (IT must be true, a verified dude in his truck wearing sunglasses told me so!) I bet it's actually a legitimate hail marry attempt to get some money out of the site.

Yet another company run into the ground by an African diversity-hire CEO. When will the woke madness end?

This is the only legit funny take I've seen regarding ratepocolypse . All of the "twitter is dying" noise reads so performative to me.

Yet another company run into the ground by an African diversity-hire CEO. When will the woke madness end?

While it's not great, I have to admit I'm clodhopper enough that it made me laugh 🤷‍♀️

Funny. The post you're responding to isn't much better, but don't do this.

or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing

Best guess I've got is that it will last exactly until a deal is signed with some big AI company for access to the dataset.

I really don't want to see an AI trained by Twitter.

That was just Tay, right?

https://gwern.net/leprechaun

There appear to be several similar AI-related leprechauns: the infamous Microsoft Tay bot, which was supposedly educated by 4chan into being evil, appears to have been mostly a simple ‘echo’ function (common in chatbots or IRC bots) and the non-“repeat after me” Tay texts are generally short, generic, and cherrypicked out of tens or hundreds of thousands of responses, and it’s highly unclear if Tay ‘learned’ anything at all in the short time that it was operational;


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