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One thing that rolls around in my head when talking about the rise in transgenderism is the complexity of comparing outcomes. Now I don’t personally think this topic should be primarily judged through an outcomes lens, and my position isn’t based on it. However, it inevitably gets tossed around, and it’s also related to the question of how much a rise in transgenderism is revealed preferences vs changed preferences, so to speak.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that a person who transitioned in the past, say even 2003, would have poorer outcomes on average than a person who transitioned today, due to both medical progress and social acceptability etc. Consequently, the baseline unhappiness for a person to transition should end up being higher in 2003 than 2023.
Thus there’s a lot of argument that the rise in transgenderism is at least partly due to a lot of people who would have transitioned in 2003 in a 2023 environment. And I think that’s straightforwardly true.
But I still think that doesn’t show the whole picture Consider the difference in comparing the level of happiness of a person who transitions today as compared to…
• If they didn’t transition today vs
• If they didn’t transition in 2003.
I think social contagion is certainly partly responsible in cause. [There are certainly some people who would never have felt gender dysphoria if they weren’t socialized into this, and I think it accounts for a lot of ROTD in young women, but I suspect it’s also less so in men with AGP, though I definitely suspect things like porn as @2rafa suggest also cause an increase in amount of AGP.] But I think it is also responsible partly for degree of dissatisfaction. How many people in a social context where transition wasn’t an option, would have been happier not transitioning than people not transitioning in a social context where it is an option? Again, the answer seems obviously a lot.
A person tempted to drink, but trying to remain sober is probably going to have a harder time at a party where they’re being encouraged to drink than in an environment where everyone is sober and encouraging them to stay so. So the real comparison is how much happier is a person who transitions in 2023 than that same person would have been if they hadn’t transitioned in 2003.
Obviously it’s a difficult if not impossible measurement. But I think there’s reason to believe that the answer on average is less happy. And if that were true, there’s an argument for a society that is less accommodating, knowing that the person who transitions is less happy, but on average the individual doesn’t transition and is happier for it.
Consider it a related thought experiment that could be measured:
Take a group of children and divide them into four blind groups. **Groups A and B **are given an enthusiastic conversation about and shown advertisements etc for Disney World and told they might get to go there this weekend. Only Group A is taken. Group B is brought to a local playground for the day.
Group C is also shown the advertisements and get the topic presented, but not told that they have a chance to go, and are told upfront they will be taken to a local playground, which they are. Group D is also taken to the local playground after being told they would be, and not shown any adversement for Disney, even though they are likely aware of it.
Even though we might expect that the kids in Group A might have a better time than the kids in group D, it’s reasonable to assume B will have the worst time of it.
Now suppose one wanted to make an argument that A’s overall satisfaction was not great enough over D’s or even C’s to be worth the expense of taking them there, and that C’s and B's satisfaction could be most effectively increased by including them in group D (avoid showing them DW promotions), rather than A’s (taking them to Disney World).
Now imagine that your opponent’s response was to compare A to B (the group who was told might go and then denied) and used B’s dissastisfaction to argue for making D’s into C’s, dissatisfied C’s into Bs, and then arguing it’s human decency to make A available to all Bs.
TLDR, my, not particularly unique point, is that I bet there's a lot of people with a given level of dysphoria, who would have lived a hardly affected life untransitioned 20 years ago, but would suffer much more for it in today's context, and that should be accounted for in extending social permissiveness.
Since many here will already agree with me, I'll go ahead and make the more controversial: The same argument above but for divorce, extramarital sex, and religious participation.
yes_chad.jpg
Or to elaborate: a lot of what our modern culture is selling as freedom and pursuit of happiness is absolutely fake, and we'd be a lot better of just forbidding it (in fact, I'll go out on a limb and say the only reason these things were allowed and promoted was to meet depopulation goals).
I don't even think the satisfaction / dissatisfaction comes quite from the mechanism you describe. Does cake taste good because I'm not allowed to eat it every meal, or do I not eat it because I know it would come with negative consequences, and would end up not tasting as good as a result of eating it so much? I'm pretty sure it's the latter, and so it is with all the other things you mentioned.
This really is a matter of preference. Some people, like you and Tretiak, prefer the authoritarian blend, others like me prefer the liberal blend. If our society had stronger freedom of association, you and Tretiak could go off and build a sub-society where you forbid those things you dislike for anyone who wishes to live there.
The idea of you imposing your preference on the larger society is non-negotiable for me. I will use violence if necessary to stop any such efforts. But I do not want it to come to that. Hence the need to reform freedom of association so that people who prefer to live in more authoritarian or more exclusionary societies have a place to call their own, assuming of course that they do not hold anyone, including their own children, captive behind iron curtains, disallowing them from experiencing other societies.
I can't speak for the others, but I think characterising this distinction as 'authoritarian' or 'liberal' misses the point. It's not freedom or lack of freedom, but rather one conception of freedom verses a different conception of freedom.
There's two very brought conceptions of freedom, which the first of which I'll label the British/empirical/analytical (liberal) conception of freedom, and the second I'll label the continental conception of freedom.
The analytical conception of freedom is the one that people in the Anglosphere are most familiar with, given that its modern form was born out of the English philosophical tradition. Locke, Mills, and of course the American Founding Fathers. Simplifying greatly, their conception of freedom is one where the external tyrannies of government (or some other external authority) be limited to allow individual freedom and human flourishing. In the extreme, individual rights only end where they infringe upon another person's rights, only as a matter of practically managing conflicting individual rights. Again, something that I'm sure pretty much everyone here will be familiar with.
The continental conception of freedom, for which I name after the poorly defined school of continental philosophy, has a very much different conception of freedom. For the continental philosophers (and I am painting with a really broad brush here), the true constraint on freedom was not some external tyranny or power structure, but yourself. To the continental philosopher, the most shackled man was one who was a slave to his own desires and unable to pursue the "Good" ("Good" here is a big placeholder for any given philosopher to insert his own conception, often it was capital-R Reason, or God, or something else). The continental philosopher looks at a man who wantonly satisfies all his baser instincts as no better than an animal. Consider a man who just fulfills all his most base and carnal desires today - maybe this man sits in his parents basement all day, eating junkfood, smoking weed, playing video games and jacking off to porn all day. Is this man truly free? From a liberal perspective, yes he is. He can do whatever wants with no authority to constrain his behaviour. But to the continental philosopher, this man is a wretched beast in full thrall of his desires. He has no capacity to reason, to think, to act. He's not a moral agent in the same way an animal isn't a moral agent.
Instead, a man truly becomes free when (in one conception) he is able to use Reason to overcome his desires and fulfil a higher purpose. Freedom then, paradoxically, comes from restraint, and restraint from your base desires most of all. A man who commits himself to Reason, or God, or some other higher purpose is infinitely more free than the man who jacks off all day in the basement, even when that commitment requires some external restraint and authority imposed upon him. Actually, even that's not completely accurate. It's more that the continental philosopher sees no distinction between freedom and external restraint. If you're a Kantian, to be free is to use Reason, which is to follow the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative isn't so much an external constraint on behaviour but the natural outcome of someone who is truly committed to Reason and is liberated by it.
Edit: To clarify, the continental conception of freedom believes that true freedom is the ability (granted by Reason, or God, etc) to make a choice: live your life for the purpose of the Good, or live fulfilling your base desires. Obviously choosing the former is the correct choice, virtually by definition. Those who are slaves to their desires don't even get to make this choice, thus aren't free.
The continental conception of freedom has been in many cases criticised (typically by those who believe in an analytic/liberal conception of freedom) as leading to authoritarian tendences. This is not an unfounded criticism. Because this conception of freedom comes by serving the Good, sometimes this means that people have to be made free. Not in the liberal sense, but people must be forced to act in such a way that they will eventually become liberated. This is where you get things like the wonky Marxist conceptions of freedom. To the Marxist, man is not truly free in a liberal society, he is a slave to the capitalist socialisation. Only when man achieves critical consciousness and and achieves the Marxist Good (communist utopia), will he be truly free. Which is why one-party authoritarian Marxist states can claim to be more free than liberal democracies, because they see themselves further along that path than liberal democracies.
However, I think the idea that the continental conception of freedom must necessarily lead to authoritarianism to be unhelpful and untrue. I would say it's about as equally true to say that the analytical/liberal conception of freedom must necessarily lead to moral nihilism, hedonism and solipsism. That is to say, neither of them are true, but they contain an element of truth to them.
And while I have framed the above as an Enlightenment phenomenon, really these ideas are much older than that. In Plato's The Republic, the old man Cephalus cites the poet Sophocles who says*, to paraphrase, he is glad to have become old where his desires (eros) has diminished, and that his desires were like a harsh and cruel mistress which he is now free of. His base desires having left him, he has now truly become free. And similarly, St Augustine's doctrine of original sin. We are all sinful, miserable creatures. It is only by the grace of God which allows us to overcome our sinful nature, our sinful instincts, do we truly become free.
I think what "authoritarian"-preferring commentors (as you are describing them) are saying is that that is a clear void in our society where the continental conception of freedom is concerned. This void was traditionally filled by traditional religion and traditional morality, something that has been dying a slow and painful death. I tend to agree with these commentors that the liberal conception of freedom alone isn't sufficient and is a strong source of societal decay. Actually - there is a form of continental freedom that is gaining traction nowadays, an old friend back in a new skin: Critical Marxism/Neo-Marxism/Western Marxism aka the woke or whatever you want to call them. I believe to truly stop the tide of the woke you need to offer an alternative form of continental freedom. Liberalism isn't enough.
*Translated in the version on Project Gutenberg as: "How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, How does love suit with age, Sophocles,—are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."
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I don't think it's so straight forward. The distinction between authoritarianism and liberalism seems like a semantic one to me in this case. Coming back to the example of the cake we can have a liberal rule that says "people should be able to decide what they want to eat", but are they still deciding in any meaningful way if school cafeterias offer nothing but different kinds of cake? Sure, your parents can still put something healthier in your lunchbox, sure you can change your diet when you graduate... but what are the chances of you picking up a healthier diet if cake is all you know, and what are the chances of your parents sending you to school with something healthy, if cake is all they ever knew themselves?
Are you engaging in guerrilla warfare as we speak? Because society is imposing it's preferences on you.
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I haven't seen statistics, but my impression was that the Amish aren't actually losing that many people to exit, and that they explicitly tell you to go out and experience the outside world as an adult before you make the final decision of whether you want to remain Amish.
That said, this isn't a very good example of the magnitude of freedom of association. Why, specifically, do I have to go full isolationist to be able to offer an alternative to what the establishment teaches, when officially we're supposed to be a pluralist democracy? Why is it that when people try to engage their local democratic system to influence the education of their children, they get branded as "hate groups" and "domestic extremists"? I suppose it's nice that if I show sufficient fanaticism in disengaging the system, while not challenging it directly, I might be tolerated for the time being, but it's a bit perverse to pretend that this is freedom.
Also one thing to keep in mind is that you're writing from an American perspective. A lot of supposedly liberal democracies are a lot more intolerant of non-participation. For example home schooling in Europe is a lot harder, and in some places nearly illegal.
Neither are the haredim, although the Fundamentalist LDS are(that’s due at least partly to their unusual social structure that actively encourages defection from certain groups).
In general fundamentalist groups have much lower apostasy rates than commonly assumed, and a lot of that apostasy is to join a different very conservative denomination. The Amish and Haredim are just an extreme form thereof.
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Unfortunately, it is the religious conservative crowd (and their sympathizers) who were the public face of anti-lgbt for some time--and this group has zero credibility when it comes to arguments rooted in principled liberalism.
While there are many kinds of diversity that can be tolerated in a liberal environment, one that rejects the principle of liberalism itself is obviously logically incompatible with that environment. In that case, the best that can be offered is an enclave-type arrangement.
You could say that all this applies to the illiberal left as well. I agree. Without condoning it, I think the left, bring borne from the same tradition as classical liberalism, is simply better than the right in couching their position in liberal terms; they have the credibility. I try to tell any liberal who will listen that the left is not liberal but old habits and all.
What's the principle of liberalism? The only thing that comes to mind is the presumption of liberty, which broadly says that most of the time it is best to let people do what they want and that any coercion requires good reasons.
I don't think any group of any consequence in current Western politics rejects this presumption, they are just disagreeing what constitutes 'good reasons'.
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huadpe:
me:
you:
Make it make sense, please. You cannot attack average conservatives for being anti-lgbt in order to defend the argument that the glorious and tolerant liberal system allows groups like he Amish, Hasidim, and fundamentalist LDS sects to flourish. Do you think they have a more liberal approach towards LGBT people?
No they don't. They were swearing up and down they're in favor of freedom of speech, privacy, and peace, and the moment they got power they turned into censorious, surveillant warmongers. To be honest probably the reason I ever gave them any credibility on liberal principles was that I was too young to remember their past excesses.
It's quite clear, I don't know what it is youre not understanding. I'm not attacking average conservatives, they can believe what they want, as long as they're not trying to force their way of life on me. I'm pointing out the that it is illogical to appeal to liberal sensibilities of inclusion to paint liberals as the bad people for rejecting the illiberal tendencies of conservatives.
As I said, I think there are many things about the conservative viewpoint that can coexist with object-level liberals in a liberal meta-system. Of course if conservatives reject liberalism itself, that can't be tolerated for game theoretical reasons.
In that case the best that can be offered is an enclave -- which is far more tolerant and accomodating and than conservatives would be, if the shoe were on the other foot.
But your argument is incoherent in the light of the conversation being around the Amish and Hasidim. Their illiberal tendencies are even stronger then those of conservatives.
Ok, but that makes even less sense. Do you think liberals who are in favor of age of consent laws are rejecting liberalism itself? Or are liberals who are in favor of state-recognized marriage being exclusively monogamous rejecting liberalism itself? If not, how were people who were against LGBT rejecting liberalism itself?
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Because the liberals were too goddamn namby-pamby about things and instead wanted to believe the "it's only a few small social changes to make things fairer, it's never going to affect you" line. Then when the leopards started eating their faces, they suddenly couldn't believe how that happened. They had been so friendly to the leopards all along! They put out yard signs saying how much they loved leopards!
It's the Little Red Hen all over again - if you weren't there sticking up for the people being called zealots and bigots and anti-LGBT from the start, why do you expect to make any ground now?
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The issue is that really we don’t have a free country anyway. Values will be imposed regardless of who’s in charge. The current regime is pushing the country hard on DEI and LGBT, the dissidents want to replace that ideology with Traditional Christianity and Meritocracy. Something closer to Classical Liberalism would be letting communities decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to live like their religion matters to them or want to have the wokest community ever? Why is it that people who aren’t on board with those kinds of things are having to go to fairly extreme lengths to hide their beliefs and to protect their children from exposure to things they find abhorrent? And if the shoe was on the other foot I don’t think that would more fair. I don’t think it’s somehow better that we go full Christian Nationalism and require non Christians to go into hiding or even just have to carefully curate their children’s experience to protect them from being secretly baptized or something. Liberal used to mean “leave people alone”, not a busybody state trying to train people to believe right so they vote right.
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While the existence of depopulation goals is so well documented that it’s not a conspiracy theory anymore, they don’t seem to have been targeted at wealthy first worlders. So this theory has to account for why these things are more first world than third.
you've got to explain rather than just asserting its true.
on its face, this doesn't seem to make much sense to me: upper class would likely be quite averse to a shrinking population (this is why they are also broadly in favor of immigration). a shrinking population base can more easily demand higher wages on the basis that there are few able to perform their job. this is why you see such people like Elon Musk decrying the so-called "population crisis," with a smaller population basis, it can be harder to exert control in some scenarios (specifically for skilled labor).
you have two not necessarily competing "solutions" to this, Republicans will tend to call for banning of abortion and Democrats will tend to call for a very uh... liberal immigration.
i'd also argue that the type of low-skill worker is where depopulation would be least prevalent, why pay a living wage when you can pay illegal immigrants much less (and this wage gap has been documented1) for the same amount of work as a legal immigrant or a native-born.
1: See page 10 of the link. It seems to be relatively difficult to find strict numbers on like average wages, but it's likely I didn't look hard enough. Regardless, programs like E-Verify here in the United States tend to keep illegal immigrants out of most skilled labor, the hearsay seems reliable enough (I guess as much as it can be).
I mean, just look at the history of the eugenics movement, and what happened to it (spoiler alert: they did not go away in shame). Various iterations of "sustainable growth" are explicitly on the agenda on every world-spanning establishment organization from the UN to the WEF, and has been for decades. Some countries like China and India went to quite extreme lengths to lower their population growth.
That's the beauty of it: if you successfully decrease the natives' fertility, you can then use it as an excuse to increase immigration. By the second generation the immigrants from the fertile countries you're importing will turn into the same sort of hedonist-nihilist low fertility bots westerners have already become. Just keep marching fresh immigrants into the meat-grinder, and you have the best of both worlds - decreasing population, and a steady supply of low wage workers.
Except Elon Musk is now a "far-right extremist", and for every Musk I can find you 10 Rockefellers, Ehrliches, Huxleys, Strongs and Ghandis.
sure i'll give you China and India, but outside of that I still find the argument that this is happening on a mass scale outside of these 2 exceptions to be lacking and without merit
as ironically nihilistic as this comment is, it seems again a extremely poor choice. why not just do both? you can get unchecked immigration with a rising population, although it's admittedly not very stable at high rates of both, and also lock people into bitter political rivalries
being far right or whatever political philosophy you say he is does not exempt him from his primary motivation: wealth accumulation. his concern is a poor theatre. he is one of the richest men in the world, he is going to advocate policies that are going to be in his interest, while putting on a poorly done kayfabe of concern for humanity or whatever.
The cases if China, and India are undeniable, my claim is that the implementation in the West is a lot more subtle, so you're not going to see a smoking gun like this, but the the fact that the world elites were explicitly debating depopulation as a goal is also pretty much undeniable.
Wait... how was it nihilistic?
Because they don't want to? If their goal is to depopulate while maintaining their wealth, why would they want to increase population?
On this we agree. Though I don't think it's so much advocating for policies in his interest, as pandering to an internet tribe so the tribe will circle the wagons around him.
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At a basic level, third worlders simply don't have time for a lot of the progressive nonsense first worlders love to preoccupy themselves with. This kind of garbage you get out of the progressive wing, is only the kind of stuff you can afford to entertain in a fabulously wealthy country that has no real external threats or internal ailments of any kind. As used to be a saying in Catholicism, "idle hands are the Devil's playthings." When people have no real problems to contend with, they start creating them where none exist.
What are you referring to specifically when you're saying depopulation "goals?" We all know it's happening, but what are you saying is at the driving force of it? When I watch CNN for instance, and they're occasionally say something about the population, and then later something about the need to import further immigrants from third world countries to make up the difference, I see that as a byproduct of their fundamental political views (i.e. racial diversity is a good thing, I have no self-esteem, I need to pat myself on the back to feel good, etc.).
This is little more than a screed about "my enemies only believe these objectively dumb things because they're dumb and unselfaware." Arguing that progressivism is a luxury ideology is fine (lots of people have done that), but "I have no self-esteem, I need to pat myself on the back to feel good, etc." is not something you can simply ascribe without anything more than your feelings about it.
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Clearly you hate progressivism with a burning passion, but just because someone genuinely believes in racial diversity doesn’t make it “garbage” or “bullshit” and doesn’t give you the right to psychoanalyze them all into having low self esteem.
I could just as easily say Christians believe in a benevolent god because they’re wealthy and don’t have to worry about real problems, and having a big sky daddy helps them with their low self esteem.
Less heat more light please.
I'm definitely not sympathetic progressivism's 21st century incarnation, for sure. Believe whatever you what about racial diversity, but shit logic that gets you there doesn't cease being shit, if it 'is' shit. I believe in racial diversity myself, but there's no denying there's a crucial self-esteem component to the motivation that underlies a 'lot' of what progressives do.
I deny it.
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Their fundamental political views are downstream of an understanding that a growing population is necessary, and that you can’t have a first world population growing through natural multiplication without cutting back a bit on women’s lib(although I don’t think you have to cut back very much- the red tribe is at replacement and objectively their women are pretty free, even if the CNN crowd can’t acknowledge that for ideological reasons). Hence immigration, and a fig leaf that it’s preferred due to ‘diversity’.
The driving force behind depopulation goals is a substantial part of the world’s elites Unironically believing in malthusianism. That was the stated justification for India’s population control campaign, and it’s hard not to realize it’s the reason behind population control campaigns in Africa as well. And you’ll notice that actually happening population control campaigns are usually in developing world crapholes- where wealthy developed countries have a thumb on the fertility scales, it’s in favor of more fertility, often specifically out of wedlock births. Contrast that to government policies in, say, India or up until recently China. This does not look like anti-white-natalism.
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I would much rather live in a ball busting autocracy where things are stable and the trains ran on time, than a free and liberated San Francisco where a thief or homosexual can attack or berate me, as I'm walking down the sidewalk, trying to get to work on time. I certainly think the western conception of freedom is largely a ridiculous notion in many ways.
Perhaps the best open display I ever saw that amounted to a defense against 'freedumb' loving stuff, was Tharman Shanmugaratnam's interview with Steve Sackur of the BBC, some years ago. 'Freedom' as a concept calls itself home to many camps, which aren't exclusive to the social laissez-fairism you find in the US. An acknowledgement that you need compromises on certain civil liberties to achieve others, which results in a healthier and more free society, of the variety people can respect or truly appreciate, is a goal that's far more meaningful in my view, than someone's right to burn down the whole social system by screaming the N-word at someone, while standing on the roof of their house.
What about the freedom of people to walk the streets at night, without the fear of assault or being raped; particularly if you're a woman or a child? What about the freedom of economic and social mobility that's tied to one's effort and used to be the whole point of a meritocracy, instead of pointing the fingers at others and claiming it's society that's keeping you down?
Meritocracy is a violation of the natural order of things, it’s the antithesis of the ordered society that you describe yourself as wanting. Meritocracy is fundamentally liberal.
Isn’t the police force necessary to maintain large-scale private property ownership also a violation of the “natural order”?
Not really. It's the institutionalization of "if you touch my stuff, Cousin Vinny will break your arms. Cousin Vinny, here's a token of gratitude for your trouble".
But then that argument can be extended to show that any social organization whatsoever is "natural".
"If we don't govern all of our institutions by exam-based meritocracy, Cousin Vinny will break your arms. Cousin Vinny, here's a token of gratitude for your trouble."
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Whats to happen to us higher IQ but grew up poor folks in this "natural order" that you describe?
Just send us to the mines?
I think ‘meritocracy’ is a complicated concept. Even in traditional societies smart people of humble birth could do very well. But there wasn’t the same deliberate effort to ensure an easy pipeline so we don’t miss out on the mythological one million secret Einsteins hiding in the trailer park.
There is probably a lot of muddy semantics here.
But I'm interested in an effort post about "meritocracy". Because to me "meritocracy" is the "natural order". Those who are better at things rise to the top. What those things are, is subject to change, not the sorting process.
What value trumps extracting the most 'value' from all inhabitants of a system?
To me meritocracy refers to the deliberate effort to destroy systems of inherited status (the doctor is the son of the doctor, the banker the son of the banker, the king the son of the last king) in favor of Chinese Civil Service exam type systems where the state pursues a bizarre and sociopathic levelling policy in which it sees it as its duty to test, rank and uplift everyone according to their IQ (or an easy proxy thereof).
Meritocracy by nature I have no problem with, of course.
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I think that many people have missed the point of the western conception of freedom and view it as an end in itself. The people who want to scream the N-word don't seem to realise that the ultimate freedom they extol is freedom that requires they build a fortress in which to scream it. It's the freedom to defect while overlooking the implication of being unprotected from being defected against. Suffer what wilt be done would be the whole of the law.
The freedom we have in the west, or at least the concept, is that we have the freedom to choose which compromises we make on our liberties. That is, we can (theoretically, imperfectly) exercise some choice in which personal freedoms to trade away for a greater social gain. It's a quid pro quo.
The trade-off isn't the problem. The failure to deliver (cynically, the failure to honour) the deal is the problem.
This is too abstract for me to really grok. Can you elaborate a bit on who is failing to honor which deal?
Both the state and the public fail in their own ways, and it can be due to legitimate difficulty or cynical dishonourableness.
A simple example is speed limits. We accept a state regulated limit on our freedom to not drive faster than say 70mph so that our journeys are safer than they would be otherwise, and at the second order they're more efficient too (less road closures due to pile-ups). Our freedom was reduced in exchange for those benefits, but we retain the greater freedom to change or remove that limit via the democratic process. Yet some people still choose to defect from something as easy as not speeding.
There's a difference between failure to deliver on the social contract and failure to honour it. Say we gave the police £200 to patrol a motorway and eliminate 100% of speeding. They would inevitably fail to deliver, point out it's not a realistic target and reasonably request an increase to the budget. But if we gave them £200 million and there was no improvement in their performance it would be reasonable to assume that they're not trying.
On the other hand say we offered a homeless person a subsidised house so that they could get back on their feet and become independent. If the house was cold, damp, and next to a factory pumping out toxic smoke they might have understandable grounds to reject the deal and go back to sleeping rough in the posh part of town where the air is sweet and the begging is easy. But if the house was plain and adequate with access to suitable work nearby and it turned out they sold the copper and then turned it into a combination knocking shop and trap house it's hard to justify trading away more social goods of state expenditure and the loss of potential responsible residents to enable further defection.
In short the rights and privileges we experience as freedom come with responsibilities and associated costs. We, as public and the state, are free to renegotiate the costs and benefits rather than suffering them by diktat or anarchy but we are responsible for exercising good faith in upholding the agreements. The N-word screamer wants the freedom to defect at will and neglects to realise his stance implies other people's freedom to blast a combination of spam advertising and malicious slander back at them. The anarchist/libertarian neglects that zeroing out the state monopoly on violence and legitimacy re-opens a competition which leads back to where they began only de facto instead of de jure.
I don't recall agreeing to that, and I'm fairly sure all the other people doing 80 on I-80 didn't agree to it either. There is no dishonor per se in breaking the law, only disobedience. The law is the output of a sausage machine, not a freely-entered agreement between governed and governing.
You and all the other drivers tacitly accepted those conditions when you applied for a licence to drive on the state's roads. You're free to walk at whatever speed you like.
The democratic sausage machine aspires to the freedom to be user serviceable, the other sausage machines don't. It's not like you can get away from the butcher.
Certainly I did not.
Suppose I'm driving without a license? Does that mean I am free of other traffic laws?
I need not ascribe moral authority to the butcher, and I do not.
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And this is precisely why it always seemed to be a pipe dream that only ends in failure. Because if people have missed the entire western conception of freedom on this point, then virtually the 'entire' population missed it long ago, and by a very substantial margin. Any true condition of freedom at play, ultimately requires that its adherents take the good with the bad. Any conception of freedom truly worth the name, can't stand to reason on a one-sided conception of freedom of action and liberty, which also ignores consequence. You have the free will to act as you will as far as your agency goes, and call someone the N-word, but if you demand insularity and protection from the consequences of someone who pulls a gun out and shoots you for it, you aren't a person that wants freedom.
Observing the way people in the west choose to live their life, gives me no logical indication to suggest that what they want is "freedom." Because if freedom entails 'responsibility', most people don't want to have 'anything' to do with it. The freedom Americans want and feel they're entitled to, is the same freedom a selfish 5-year-old believes he's entitled to, to demand and be given what he wants on a whim and have someone else pay the cost for it down the road. I would submit contra your final point, that the trade-off is precisely the problem. Freedom is certainly important. But it is most definitely 'not' an absolute value. Not even concepts like freedom of speech are absolute values. It doesn't give you the right to harass people. Science isn't an absolute value. It ends at the Nazi's human medical experiments. 'Nobody' has an unbridled absolute right to freedom, let alone to do whatever they want, whenever they want. Which is certainly how most Americans conceptualize their right to it.
I concur with your criticisms but would push back against the doomerism of inevitable failure. While many people misunderstand the concept of freedom intellectually most of them get it intuitively and don't count themselves as suffering unjustly for the restrictions against selling their own children into slavery, dumping their rubbish in the road or using racist language. It's not perfect, it will never be perfect, but there's many ways it could be a lot worse. It works best when people act responsibly.
My point is freedom is not all or nothing, it's how much and who decides. The freedom fetishists are engaged in binary thinking: Freedom vs oppression, self vs everyone else. Of course they want freedom for themselves. Their error is missing how oppressive it would be if everyone else was free of restrictions too. Your presumably rhetorical wish of living in a ball-busting autocracy is a mirror image where it's oppression for everyone else with significant cost to your own freedom. You can walk the streets at night but you will be required to report for assigned work in the morning.
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One of those is a word, the other is murder, my 𝓃𝒾𝑔𝑔ℯ𝓇. Nobody advocates for the freedom to murder, people in sane countries do advocate for the freedom to say whatever words you want.
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