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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Hello! Today, on "Fucking Stupid Politics", here's a peach, a pippin, a doozy of an example.

'Why is peepul thinking we wuz talkin' 'bout killin' peepul? Y they not get de IMPORTANT ENVIRONMENTAL CLIMATE CHANGE FIGHTIN' POINT?'

Because you idiots made it about "killing", "taking out", "terrorists", etc. That is why people are discussing the ethics of murder and not your BIG IMPORTANT POINT.

These are the same people who would lip-wibble over "speech is violence". Imagine I did a graphic about "this is the harm reduction we could ensure by killing just one trans activist". Do you think they'd be all "Well Chauncey, that is an interesting rhetorical device to illustrate your thesis"? No, they'd be screaming about hate speech, death threats, inciting violence, and demanding not alone banning from all online media but the police to get involved.

And this is why they are shooting themselves in the foot over such campaigns. Never mind that if right this minute all fossil fuel extraction and production stopped, and we only had renewables and limited nuclear power to rely on. Our entire global civilisation would be in a lot of trouble because we haven't yet solved the transition problems.

The notes are getting hung up on how the carbon offset for killing an oil executive was calculated, and y'all, it's not supposed to be an accurate calculation of exactly what would happen if you killed an oil executive, it's meant to highlight just how unbelievably vast the environmental impact of the bigwigs at BP or Exxon is compared to yours, and ultimately how the planet is being knowingly and purposefully killed by a small handful of uber wealthy individuals.

No, let's keep discussing ethics. They could use a stern course of Aquinas. Even BP oil execs do not get up in the morning and go "Today I think I shall be Evil. Let me knowingly and purposefully kill the planet!" (Moustache twirling, evil laughter and gleeful hand rubbing optional).

Those guys are trying to make a living, provide a service, and sell goods. Yes, increase the profits of their company. Yes, get rich. Yes, all that. But that only happens because the entire world pretty much runs on oil. Up until the mid-19th century, petroleum deposits were useless or even seen as devaluing land if you had a lake of thick black goop slopping out of the ground. Ironically, petroleum could be seen as the environmentally friendly option, given that it replaced whale oil (due to the dwindling population of whales that were being hunted to provide oil). And so our industrial civilisation was built around it.

You can't slam the brakes on all of a sudden to move from fossil fuels to other sources. And the dumb stupid "punch a Nazi" lazy 'we're fighting a war here and we're the soldiers in the army of right' tropes on display here about "killing" people just for the job they do don't help. This is why ordinary people think the Just Stop Oil etc. campaigns are damn stupid.

Because they are.

EDIT: Ah feck it, while I'm being ranty anyway: this is instructive to compare to what I'm seeing about "Trump's 'we're coming for you' tweet is being investigated" as presumably incitement to violence and death and treason and coup and the rest of it. I was already thinking about "I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of political speeches and speeches by police commissioners and DAs and so forth about 'coming after/coming for/look out you're next' political opponents, crime, etc." so singling out this as a unique example of "no it's a definite threat of physical harm" seems to be leaning heavily on the scales.

The same way the Gabby Giffords assassination attempt was portrayed as "the Republicans with their target crosshairs poster set her up for this", never mind that people found examples of Democratic politicians also using targets/crosshairs in similar statements.

And now this: 'if we talk about killing someone, you should understand it only means 'if there were one fewer oil exec in a job' but if you use languatge like that, you really do mean to kill/harm your opponents' perfect example of one law for me and another law for thee.

  • -10

I know I’m being an SJW, but I don’t think you should use African-American dialect pejoratively like this. I don’t think these are black people to begin with, and this wouldn’t be a good way to respond even if they were.

It's meant to be idiot speak, and if you think that sounds like Black English, I think that's more of a reflection on you than me.

This reminds me of some miminy-piminy pursedmouth posting at Neil Gaiman about "ooh a building in one of the episodes of the TV adaptation of 'Good Omens' which you co-wrote has anti-homeless spikes", trying to show off how Virtuous they were and take a scalp of a Big Gun as well, and being tutored that the particular object they pointed out in the screengrab was, in fact, a Victorian boot scraper.

Try harder to be Woker Than Thou.

Like @raggedy_anthem, I do not believe you intended to sound Black. Because AAVE is an alternate dialect with different pronunciations and rules of grammar, and because it is primarily spoken by members of a socially disadvantaged class, the stereotypical “idiot” pronunciation has sometimes shifted towards that (actually fairly complicated and internal-rule-abiding) dialect. This isn’t on me or on you. It’s on the pre-existing history of seeing Black Americans as social inferiors.

Given the surrounding social environment here, I don’t expect to gain points for wokeness. I do think that it’s useful to avoid normalising racial caricature, even unintentionally.

Ah well, over here we drop g as well. Maybe Southern English has a lot of that Scots-Irish influence, which then naturally was the kind of English the black slaves learned and developed into a patois of their own.

While I personally thought you were going for baby talk and not something racial, I don’t think @gemmaem is being unreasonable here. You are literally putting words in your opponents’ mouths. Do you have any reason, other than your absolute enmity, to believe that these tumblr-dwellers actually Can’t English Good?

Don’t act so surprised when people mistake your exact flavor of caricature.

Do you have any reason, other than your absolute enmity, to believe that these tumblr-dwellers actually Can’t English Good?

Because anyone who seriously argues "why is everyone talking about the part where I said about killing someone instead of my cool graphics?" Can't Anything Good.

You are saying that if someone says stupid things in one area, they must be overall stupid. This doesn't follow.

I didn't read it as AAEV. If that was the intention, well, it could've been done better. But I honestly didn't get that vibe.

Ah feck it, while I'm being ranty anyway: this is instructive to compare to what I'm seeing about "Trump's 'we're coming for you' tweet is being investigated" as presumably incitement to violence and death and treason and coup and the rest of it. I was already thinking about "I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of political speeches and speeches by police commissioners and DAs and so forth about 'coming after/coming for/look out you're next' political opponents, crime, etc." so singling out this as a unique example of "no it's a definite threat of physical harm" seems to be leaning heavily on the scales.

Wait, what?

The issue with Trump's "IF YOU GO AFTER ME I'M COMING AFTER YOU" post isn't that it's inciting or threatening violence (it isn't). It's that it's arguably an attempt to intimidate witnesses in a criminal trial. "I'M COMING AFTER YOU" probably doesn't imply anything other than mean tweets in this context, but that's still witness tampering.

Probably it won't get prosecuted because it would be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump was directing the warning at potential witnesses. But for those of us burdened with less onerous standards of proof, c'mon, of course he was.

I am extremely confident you can't point to a speech or statement from a DA or a police commissioner that can reasonably be characterised as an attempt to intimidate a witness to remain silent.

Under your frame whats the difference between

  1. Charge opposition politician with a crime
  2. Slap gag order on him from making normal political speech
  3. He makes political speech
  4. Declare him guilty of witness tampering

Because him comment is well a very normal political statement.

Also very similar to to General Flynn

  1. Logan Act exists but never used and never a prior challenge to Supreme Court - likely unconstitutional
  2. Flynn does what every new administration does - they talk to foreign governments between winning election and inauguration (And this is necessary to limit policy gaps)
  3. Investigate Flynn for Logan Act violation
  4. He lies or obstructs on this which is a behavior widely done but technically illegal
  5. Drop Logan Act charge and get him for lying to FBI

It just looks like Lawfare to me. And he who controls the justice system wins

I don't agree that "him comment is well a very normal political statement". A normal political statement is something like "I will cut taxes and reduce waste", "My opponent has sold out the American people", "Make America Great Again", etc. "IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU" is not a normal political statement. It's a clear attempt to intimidate.

There is no gag order preventing Trump from making normal political speech. He can continue to campaign, criticise the Biden Administration, etc. What he can't do is attempt to improperly interfere with a court proceeding.

Every politician uses campaign rhetoric like this about attacking their opposition. This doesn’t even reach the Maxine Waters line of calling for specific physical action.

This is just attempting to subvert Democracy by banning your oppositions speech. If he actually interferes with the court then do something. But banning speech and speech alone should be off the table.

Your solution is asking a 95% Democrat voting district to define what is “normal” speech during an election that is already super weird because they’re trying to prosecute the most popular politician in America.

And if he violates a 95% Biden voting (and Hunter Biden colleagues) definition of allowed speech - what’s the legal remedy? Lock up the President while campaigning?

Historically the parallels with Julius Caeser are eery. It’s about to be March on Rome time or meet the executioner.

And if he violates a 95% Biden voting (and Hunter Biden colleagues) definition of allowed speech - what’s the legal remedy? Lock up the President while campaigning?

He's not the President. But yes, lock him up. You don't get a pass to commit crimes with impunity just because your name is on a ballot.

Crime is just the definition of who’s in power, I guess we are on a path to cross the Rubicon.

Your opinion is against long-standing precedence of not lawfaring Presidents.

I don't accept your characterisation of Trump's indictments as "lawfare". My view is much more in line with Kevin Williamson's:

The FBI’s serving a search warrant on Donald Trump’s residence is not — in spite of everything being said about it — unprecedented. The FBI serves search warrants on homes all the time. Donald Trump is a former president, not a mystical sacrosanct being.

If we really believe, as we say we believe, that this is a republic, that nobody is above the law, that the presidency is just a temporary executive-branch office rather than a quasi-royal entitlement, then there is nothing all that remarkable about the FBI serving a warrant on a house in Florida. I myself do not find it especially difficult to believe that there exists reasonable cause for such a warrant. And if the feds have got it wrong, that wouldn’t be the first time. Those so-called conservatives who are publicly fantasizing about an FBI purge under the next Republican administration are engaged in a particularly stupid form of irresponsibility.

There are no fewer than five different congressional committees with FBI oversight powers. I’m not especially inclined to take federal agencies and their officers at their word in almost any circumstance, and so active and vigorous oversight seems to me appropriate here, as in most other cases. But if it turns out, in the least surprising political development of the decade, that Donald Trump is a criminal, then he should be treated like any other criminal.

If that did indeed establish a precedent, it would be a good precedent.

So define Trump as criminal. Then it makes it not lawfare. It’s not unprecedented because we defined Trump as a criminal. Despite the fact we spied on his campaign, invented a fake RussiaGate impeachment, used the Logan Act to target senior officials while in office (which every administration has broken), have a half dozen cases everywhere, changed statute of limitations so we could put him in court on rape (though the accused doesn’t even know what year it happened). But since we defined him as a criminal it’s not lawfare and we aren’t targeting a politician because we defined him as a criminal. It’s not unprecedented him being the first POTUS and 40% chance of being next POTUS because he’s not that he’s just a criminal. And of course all these cases are novel legal theories never used against anyone before. And then we are going to try this case with the current POTUS sons former business partner as judge. And of course instead of filing the cases earlier we are filing them during the election process.

But if it turns out, in the least surprising political development of the decade, that Donald Trump is a criminal, then he should be treated like any other criminal.

More comments

You've got nine reports for basically being antagonistic and bringing internet drama about some Tumblr nobody here to bitch about. Sometimes it's not clear where "talking about stuff happening on social media" ends and "starting threads to dunk on lolcows" begins, but this is pretty close to just lolcowing. Gosh, someone on Tumblr said something stupid? Here, let me point you to a more appropriate venue for your incisive and cutting observations about such people.

I might have let this go (other mods might not) but since you seem to be in high dudgeon and are just slagging people right and left, I'm going to give you the periodic reminder you seem to need to cool your jets and stop acting like you have special license to vent your spleen in proportion to how worked up you are.

You've had a lot of AAQCs since your last warning, so I'm just giving you another warning this time, but if you feel a need to write polemics about the latest bee in your bonnet, find a bee who at least is a recognizeable name, and then don't go off on everyone who doesn't happen to be impressed by your spleen-venting. Really, before you lash back at me like you're about to, think about it - is this really what you want this place to be for, people dragging Twitter-sorry, X, and Tumblr for some random woke idiocy to point and laugh at? It's not like there isn't a target-rich environment out there, so at least put some effort into your Two Minute Hate.

Well I am horribly sorry that I have low tolerance for "shooting my own feet off and thus destroying what would otherwise be a good argument".

Nine people got their feelings hurted? Is that a new record?

EDIT: Number alone doesn't tell me much. If one person whose opinion I value says "this thing is bad", that weighs more with me than if nine million people whose opinions don't count in my view say "it's fantastic!"

Since I have no idea who the Nine Reporters were - nor am I asking you to tell me! nor should you! - then for me it's a case of:

THAI HAIF SAID : QUHAT SAY THAY : LAT THAME SAY

I gave you the numbers because it's unusual for a comment to receive so many reports, and that is usually (not always) an indication that your comment was bad. Obviously we're not going to tell you who said what, but if you think nine people reporting you isn't enough reason to reconsider your spleen-posting and you just dismiss at as "people got their feelings hurted (sic)" (really, is that really your model for people reporting this post, that the Motte is full of climate radicals who were offended that you went off on a Tumblr climate radical?), then it makes me think that this performative navel-gazing was not sincere.

When you double down with this nonsense (which I literally can't even decipher):

THAI HAIF SAID : QUHAT SAY THAY : LAT THAME SAY

you certainly do not give the impression that you actually care about the quality of your discourse.

When you double down with this nonsense (which I literally can't even decipher):

Ah yes, I keep forgetting you children haven't read anything older than the Relatable Material in your high school English curriculum 😁

It's an older form of English (or, if I'm being exact, Lallans) which is a motto attributed to this person. Try sounding it out, you'll work it out!

But if that genuinely is too difficult, let me translate it into current American:

They have said. What say they? Let them say.

To paraphrase, it means broadly "So what if anonymous nobodies are saying this and that about me? Talk is cheap, let their tongues wag, I care not a straw whatever they may chatter".

I hope that helps with all your Gibberish Translation Needs!

(Historical illiteracy: never not entertaining to me).

Ah yes, I keep forgetting you children haven't read anything older than the Relatable Material in your high school English curriculum 😁

Seriously? This is where you want to go?

I'm not going to pull the trigger here, but considering I was trying to talk you down and you have doubled and tripled down on being directly antagonistic and condescending to a mod telling you to chill out, I'm going to let another mod decide whether this should earn you a ban.

(And btw, I'm older than you. "Historically illiterate," well, maybe when it comes to 16th century Scottish witticisms.)

Well I'll pull the trigger then.

You've got a lot of quality contributions. I would hate to see you leave, and you've been a good contributor for long enough that just about anything would result in, at most, a warning.

But going on an unbridled flamespree is past "just about anything". No, you do not get to flame people like that, nobody gets to flame people like that.

Three-day ban.

For the record, I really do hope you come back and keep posting, just not like that.

I literally can't even decipher

It's an old saying, purportedly from Scots, expressing disrespect for public reproach. "They have said. What say they? Let them say."

We must remember he is American, after all 😁 I believe I first encountered a version of it in a James Bond novel, though equally it could have been in E.R.R. Eddison's Mezentian books.

Probably not to be found in "I Am A Non-Binary Poly Trans Girl" reading text for sixth graders, which is the kind of material I'd imagine Amadan is most familiar with.

E.R.R. Eddison's Mezentian books.

Thanks for the implicit recommendation; is "The Worm Ouroboros" a reasonable place to start on that?

Probably not to be found in "I Am A Non-Binary Poly Trans Girl" reading text for sixth graders, which is the kind of material I'd imagine Amadan is most familiar with.

Of course, you might have to get back to me after the expiry of the ban you're inexplicably begging for...

I think I'm unbanned now, so, yeah.

Most finished of the lot, and sets out the entire world there. It's a preliminary novel in that it doesn't mention Zimiamavia directly but only as a reference to "that land of the blessed dead" on Mars, while the main plot of the Demons versus the Witches is going on. The frame-story of Lessingham in England doesn't really matter until we get to the Trilogy proper, where Mistress of Mistresses starts in Zimiamvia and Lessingham is a character there (not though quite the same as the English nobleman).

The Worm Ouroboros is complete in itself, and if you can manage to read your way through it, you'll know whether or not Eddison's style is for you.

It also has probably the best villain ever, Lord Gro, whom every reader loves, even though objectively he's sneaky, treacherous, back-stabbing, turn-coat with no fixed principles (save one or two) whom even the Witch-King rebukes once for "no, that's too evil a plan" 😁

Here's a review by someone else who was won over.

I don't have too strong a sense of scale here—what would be a typical number of reports?

Amadan is probably keeping count, I'm certainly not 😁

Most of the time it's a single report, although most of those we just approve. I'd say it gets into "whoa, we got a juicy one here" territory around four reports.

Nine is really high.

Not a record, though!

Breaking news: tumblr is stupid. It’s obviously talking about murder. Half the comments (notes? Retweets?) don’t get why this is a bad thing and aren’t even holding the fig leaf. Fuck these guys.

That’s still no excuse to make your own scare quotes. Congratulations, you’ve drawn them as a dumb, baby-talking soyjak. Everyone point and boo at the outgroup.

I don't care about soyjack. But this is why no, it's not because conservatives are evil fascist Nazis, it's because you guys are idiots and the way you phrase things is idiotic and you destroy what could be good campaigns because you cannot resist being idiots. Did diddums get a lil' frisson of the transgressive writing that about killing an oil exec? Did they feel all tingly and righteous?

Fucking moron.

I'm highly exercised over this because it makes trying to steelman liberal to leftist arguments so damn impossible. This could have been a really good example of things! The idea that this much space is taken up by the actions of oil companies, by comparison by what is being asked of you, the ordinary person, is really incisive! But of course, just being accurate and educational wasn't good enough, they had to signal how tough black-clad street cyberpunk revolutionary warrior they were.

I want a good conversation about this. I want the environmental movement to provide good information and come up with solutions. I want people on the left not to beclown their own side.

And that is why I'm pissed-off about this whole "uh uh we only said 'killing' why are you all hung up on that?" when if they had a spare brain cell they could have made the same point just with "one fewer oil exec" and leave it to the imagination about how you get one fewer (if you want to imagine they give up the job and retire to the countryside to grow heirloom tomatoes, go you; if you want to imagine Mounds of Skulls keep it in your own head, tiger).

The double standard wherein lefties can get away with saying and doing things, with mostly positive media coverage, that right wingers can be intensely criticized or even investigated for merely approaching is worth pointing out, but this is not a good example because it’s a literal rando on social media.

A literal rando on social media was recently imprisoned for harmful memes. Justice demands reciprocity.

I'm kinda tired of that. When does it stop being "literal rando on social media"? Didn't we see that with all the people jumping on the BLM protest bandwagons in the streets?

Isn't Oberlin College in trouble right now because it wasn't "literal rando", it was brought out into the open by the Dean and Vice-President?

I've heard the "it's only a few crazy kids on college campuses/it's only randos on social media" argument once too often. It's not.

I’m pretty sure that even in über-progressive European countries the leaders the actual theocracy parties have more seats in parliament than the willing to resort to violence environmentalists.

I mean sure, ecoterrorism and animal-rights linked violence are things that exist(and there’s not actually much difference between the two), but they’re almost never intentionally killing anyone(accidentally killing and maiming people, however, is a thing that they do).

'Why is peepul thinking we wuz talkin' 'bout killin' peepul? Y they not get de IMPORTANT ENVIRONMENTAL CLIMATE CHANGE FIGHTIN' POINT?'

I thought this was going to be a post about the NYT fretting about "backlash" to the Kill the Boer song.

On topic, the climate radicalization I see forming is turning me into a "climate change denier". I am agnostic on the impact of human emissions on the climate and tend to assume that the basic described effect of CO2 upregulating temperature is probably right, but I am increasingly seeing framing of "climate catastrophe" and "existential threat", to which I think just outright saying that this isn't happening is probably closer to the truth than some middle-ground. In the same way that "Covid is just a cold bro" would get closer to my preferred policies than "Covid is a very serious emergency", I think "climate change is not a big deal and has always happened" will be closer to my preferred policies than "climate change is literally going to end humanity" and I probably have to pick a side.

Try not to do this.

To decide that you've had it up to here with the three or so well-funded idiots who make up Just Stop Oil and that you are going to hold your nose and sign up with the "I don't mind if the third world fries, it's hot out there I'm not surprised" crowd is a perfectly normal human response, and if at least some people do it it creates good incentives for activists not to be idiots. (Although I suspect that giving noisy idiots rent-free space in your head is bad for the soul). But that is a change in political tactics - changing your views on a factual question based on the noisy idiocy of a bunch of randos is irrational. If 550ppm CO2 is in fact as bad for humanity as the IPCC says it is, then this is the kind of fact that does not care about your feelings.

I don't want the world to fry, is the thing. I want good arguments, I want people to make a strong case, I want effective tactics and some kind of thought-out plan.

"Hey amn't I cool with my 'kill the rich' stupidity" is not that. Like Sandy from the Block turning up at the Met Gala with her Eat The Rich dress.

550ppm CO2

That's only under the old 'business as usual' models. And only by 2050, even if we were on such a course. If we are worried about climate change in 2050 then that's a medium-good outcome, since we're here worrying at all.

Seeing as the IPCC never mentions 'existential' in its most recent report with the exception of low islands, climate change is something that can go on the backburner IMO.

Isn’t climate change being expensive and uncomfortable in the long run a good enough reason to think about it, though?

It's a lot less expensive and uncomfortable than many of the proposed solutions. A nuclear hellscape is expensive and uncomfortable, but I'd probably pick that over Full Communism Now.

Sure (though I think you underestimate nuclear hellscape), but we can just not listen to the batshit stuff and take the useful solutions as they are. Things like nuclear plants?

Though of course that runs into environmentalists blowing an aneurysm because they don’t understand it.

My point is that this issue in particular is worth thinking about for sensible people even if the loudest group talking about it are lunatics.

I mean, there is an actual point there about "all the campaigns aimed at inducing guilt in you, Ordinary Person, about how it's your responsibility to stop living your life are meaningless because look at the outsized influence just one megacorporation has in this situation".

But they managed to bury that by their stupid stunt over "killing an oil exec" and now they've made this point worse than useless.

I think part of the problem is that climate activism in general and Sunrise and Just Stop Oil in particular are run by people who are good at talking money out of left-wing foundations, not by people who understand climate. (This is recent - Al Gore knew what he was talking about when he was the public face of climate activism). So they tend to think of the policy problem as a fundamental moral problem whose solution needs to be enforced by the State, not as a fundamentally technical problem whose solutions need state support to implement. And the preferred frame on the stupid left is something like "All major social problems are easy to solve and the only reason they haven't already been solved is that the people in charge are mean." So there is a lot of climate left effort going into allocating blame to a small number of rich people, rather than the general mass of middle-class people consooming carbon-intensive product.

The problem is that blame is not something you can measure with a thermometer. It doesn't matter whether the carbon emissions produced by commuting to a desk job in a F150 are morally the fault of Ford shareholders, Ford executives, Ford employees, Oil company executives, oil company shareholders, oil company employees, the banks that financed them, the politicians that set up the system they operate under, or the driver. Whatever the moral arguments, at a practical level the person who has to change their lifestyle to stop those emissions entering the atmosphere is the driver.

consooming

Voted down for sneering.

Just hit the downvote button, it is not necessary to make sure everyone knows you downvoted someone.

My ordinary life is supported by the megacorporation. The reason that jets wind up emitting a bunch of CO2 is because a bunch of people like me like going cool places around the world; I'll even use credit card tricks to get the nice first-class seats, so I can enjoy a nap and a moderate priced wine on board. Manufacturing and construction companies profit off of Ordinary People like me buying houses, the oil companies get money when I go for a two-hour drive for no reason other than to watch a basketball game and hang out in a different town, and so on. I eat meat happily, order things on Amazon, and do all sorts of other things that use energy.

I say this not because I feel guilty - I don't feel even the slightest bit of guilt about the matter, but because I'm not mad at the executives either. They make their money running companies that make the incredible modern standard of living possible, and they do so by burning a shitload of fossil fuels. When someone wants an exec unalived for the crime of building a company that sells things that people want, the point is still that I actually should not be allowed to purchase those things.

Everything you say? Exactly. That's how the oil execs make the goddamn money in the first place - you, me and the people making the stupid graphic all use the benefits of modern industrial civilisation that runs off oil. "Kill the execs (in Minecraft)" does fuck-all for the problem, because we're all the problem.

With younger people especially, a lot of climate activists seem to lean towards an extreme, almost fatalistic view of the situation and consequently advocate things like mass deindustrialization and other civilization-suicide-adjacent solutions. As much as I appreciate the writings of Kaczynski, these solutions seem absurd without even getting into practicality.

The number of people with these views seems to be steadily growing at a rate I'm not sure I can fully credit to media coverage. Is it cyclical? Can anybody here that was around in the 70s provide some context? Maybe it's just edgy kids using twitter as an unprecedentedly powerful megaphone and we're still at the same base rate of this sort of thinking. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of greater general polarization.

See also: this stonetoss edit. Being nuclear-optimistic is now right-coded somehow.

/images/16914338578218443.webp

Maybe it's just edgy kids using twitter as an unprecedentedly powerful megaphone and we're still at the same base rate of this sort of thinking. Or maybe it's just a manifestation of greater general polarization.

I have non-edgy barely online friends in their 30s who seem to think a local political party's throwaway idea of the government rationing car and plane travel is what we need. These friends do travel more than they would be allowed under that scheme and they do admit it, but they basically just say "it'd suck, but that's the kind of decisive action we would need" and excitedly talk up the idea to everyone.

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What makes me doubt the honesty of climate change activists is the way they bundle their politics. If you think we’re all going to fry, then that’s all that matters. Recruit nationalists and Marxists and monster truck enthusiasts. Be open to any policy. Try to figure out ways that people can keep as many as possible of the things they love.

But of course this isn’t what we get at all.

I've found that climate change activists universally want to restrict things they never wanted to do anyway. Like own pickup trucks and have (White American) babies. While either excusing or explicitly defending things they want to do or think others should be allowed to do like leisure air travel and third world fertility. It's not exactly fake, but it is always convenient.

I suspect an argument over whether ideology or cultural disdain is prior would end up in a similar place as the endless musical chairs games of "Do religious restrictions on sexuality focus primarily on controlling women?"

There are plenty of people in the UK who campaign against airport expansion on climate grounds but whose lifestyles rely on cheap flights - I don't think the climate movement is excusing leisure air travel.

While you’re correct that first world environmental activists definitely tend to focus on things they aren’t big fans of doing themselves anyways- pickups, steaks, and babies being prominent examples- the idea that they generally support high third world fertility rates is not supported by available evidence. Population control campaigns in the third world have historically been driven by donor money that’s at least adjacent to the environmental movement in the US and Europe, as supporting evidence.

The idea that there isn’t a core of committed first world environmentalists willing to accept serious personal sacrifices is also false, although it is almost certainly true that there’s lots of them who are just after the pussy that doesn’t shower very often. Things like tree sitting and riding your bike everywhere have a long history in the US. They’re retarded personal sacrifices, but they definitely are personal sacrifices.

See also - people who were "ethical vegetarians" that got to tack on climate change as a reason later. Additionally, Covid lockdown enthusiasts who I wouldn't describe as the most social people beforehand. If I didn't know better, I'd have suggested that they might have kind of enjoyed the removal of social obligations.

As you suggest in the second paragraph, I don't think this is entirely cynical anymore than my defense of eating beef is entirely cynical. People tend to wind up with politics that align with what they kind of wanted to do anyway. It takes a fair bit of intellectual rigor to actually stop doing something that you want to do on the basis that your politics demand it.

Hey now, don't lump in ethical vegetarianism with climate change whackos. Factory farming (read: torturing billions of animals from birth to death) is evil, full stop. I have a lot of respect for people that stop eating meat on moral grounds.

Richard Hanania accounts for cancellable comments made under a pseudonym in his past like this:

Around 2008, I had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects. Naturally, this led me to look around, and come to the only logical conclusion, which was that I was naturally superior to everyone else and women in particular shouldn’t have any rights. Strangely enough, now that I have a fulfilling personal life and objective career success, such ideas don’t appeal to me anymore.

I think this makes sense as an explanation. But exactly why are we supposed to believe that the views he still holds about women are not motivated by similar frustrations? Does he need to prove that he is now completely content with his romantic life? How are we supposed to know that he doesn't still harbour some personal resentments that find their way into his political views (albeit to a lesser extent than when he was in his 20s?).

It seems hard for him to admit one thing without admitting the other, given that he has continued to specialise in saying incendiary things about the same outgroups in a similarly disagreeable style.

I wonder how hard it is to predict who will marry interracially.

I ran into an old acquaintance the other day and was surprised to find out he married a black woman. Not surprised because he was a raging racist or something. It's just that in our social circles it's still a bit of an unusual thing to do. Looking back, there was nothing about this guy that said "yes, this is precisely the kind of dude who would marry a black woman."

Maybe the big ML models used by dating services are able to identify people more likely to "marry out" than the average user. Either way, it's clear some humans do, and some absolutely never would. What's behind it? Is it genetic? A particular upbringing?

I'm not even sure why I'm so interested in this question, but I am.

Surely the most important variable is opportunity. It appears that most couples meet through various social circles

some absolutely never would.

I am guessing that this group is in reality quite small, when push comes to shove. Plenty of people say, "I would never date X," but change their mind when they meet a particular person

It's just that in our social circles it's still a bit of an unusual thing to do.

How many people of other races/ethnicities are in your social circle? If it's as diverse as a Disney Plus movie, then okay, you can be surprised. If it's 80% one ethnicity, less so. That isn't about being racist or likely to marry out, it's about "I didn't meet any hot X chicks".

Nerdy shy guys obviously very disproportionately marry East and Southeast Asian women. I've thought about this and in most cases (based on speaking to and knowing a few of these couples) I think it's because these men don't approach women, but Asian mothers flip a switch when their daughters are 25 and say "you need to get married now", and cajole said daughters into approaching a nice, shy seeming, tall guy who looks like he has his shit together. I don't think this is bad behavior at all (and white mothers could probably do the same thing), but I've often been amused (and impressed) at how forward Chinese or Chinese-American women I've met are with men they want to date. A lot of these white guys have never been approached by a pretty-ish girl (or maybe any girl) and so fall into relationships that lead to marriage and kids.

White guys with black wives are more interesting. I've known quite a few (it seems much more common in the UK than the US). I'd say they often fall into three categories.

  1. The first is possibly-slightly-xenophilic ambitious white guy with FOB or otherwise 1st generation African woman. Often both professionals, ambitious, academic. One couple I know like this are two doctors, another a lawyer and a banker. Often the woman has a history of only dating white guys, at least since she moved to the West. I think affluent African parents are more relaxed about their kids marrying white than many Asian (especially South Asian) and Arab/North African parents, possibly for cultural and religious (they're usually Christian) reasons.

  2. The second category is the 'cool' white guy with a largely black friend group. He's a DJ, works in arts or advertising, has some creative role, definitely loves rap and hiphop, prides himself on being invited to the cookout. Goes to largely black clubs and bars on weekends. May have a crustpunk/trustpunk vibe, very into BLM. Charitably, he's simply around a lot of black people and so is obviously likely to date black women, less charitably he thinks it's a form of assimilation into the black culture he so admires and/or a fetish. Maybe it's all of the above.

  3. The last category is the 'nerdy husband of nerdy middle-class black girl' category. There are a lot of black nerds but ime they very rarely date each other. Black cottagecore anime girlies have skinny, tall white glasses boyfriends with scruffy beards, and black super smash bros anime D&D guys have short, sometimes chubby, white or asian girlfriends. The only black nerd couple I've ever met were both Africans who studied in a very white European city together. I was worried about a black friend of mine because the guy she was dating had a low-key reputation for being a Sam Hyde fan and casual racist, but they're now married and he seems to worship the ground she walks on, so maybe she changed him.

As they say: Never ask a man his wage, a woman her age, or a white supremicist the race of his girlfriend.

I think affluent African parents are more relaxed about their kids marrying white than many Asian (especially South Asian) and Arab/North African parents, possibly for cultural and religious (they're usually Christian) reasons.

And because parents, like women, tend to be hypergamous, and a white son-in-law is higher status than an Asian/Arab/Indian/etc. son-in-law.

and a white son-in-law is higher status than an Asian/Arab/Indian/etc. son-in-law.

And this here is all we need to see that in western countries being "white" is still an advantage ceteris paribus relative to being a minority. Note that this isn't about "whites are actually better at important thing XYZ hence they have higher status", it's "whites with traits ABC" are seen as better than equivalent "non-whites with trains ABC". Hence the continual need for programs to elevate non-whites relative to whites.

Being white is still seen as a plus in the year of our Lord 2023, thus all the programs necessary to change this state of affairs, which incidentally are often just another artifice by a group of white "leaders" telling us what we need instead of actually listening to us, and any non-white "leaders" having drunk the progressive white Kool-Aid so hard they might as well be white people with dark skin, there are very few genuine "bring the white man down a peg or three" things out there, and when they pop up they resolutely get condemned by whites because they don't conform to white people's expectations of what minorities should be like.

Note that this isn't about "whites are actually better at important thing XYZ hence they have higher status", it's "whites with traits ABC" are seen as better than equivalent "non-whites with trains ABC".

Isn't it? That seems like a big claim that would be hard to evince.

Another possible and probably important variable- what is the reputation these other groups have as regards treatment of women?

In the heavily Hispanic parts of the US it’s surely a factor in the intermarriage rate that white men are high status, but it’s also surely a factor that the Hispanics themselves stereotype white men as drinking less and being less likely to cheat on their wives. Even if this stereotype isn’t true, latinas believing it would push them to, ceteribus paribus, prefer white men.

Amongst my subset of subcontinental culture at least white people have a pretty negative reputation for marriage purposes because everyone thinks (not completely unjustifiably) that it's highly likely that two decades down the line the white person may divorce you, and then you'd be left in a very bad position indeed. This is the view of people who otherwise white-worship even, they want to stay away from whites for marriage purposes even as they praise other aspects of whites.

Among Indians, especially Indian mothers, having straight hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, is considered a huge plus. Needless to say, the number of Indian guys who have these traits is fairly low. In the West, fair skin for men is not a plus. Blue eyes are a fetish for some girls, but green is perhaps preferred. Straight hair in men is actually a negative, the ideal being Fabio type locks.

Asian women are not nearly as influenced by their mothers, but they seem to prefer height above all else. Whether or not the top of their head is above or below their date's nipples seems to matter hugely. I really can't imagine why. They also do not prefer straight hair, presumably as they think they have that covered.

You might think that "white people" are the single group that does not prefer traits associated with another ethnic group, but this misses the diversity among white people. All girls with straight hair curl their hair. All girls with curly hair straighten it. Girls with gentle curls blow dry their hair straight and re-curl it, so it looks exactly as it was before. Girls who are pale desperately try to tan. Blonde girls cry over their lack of eyebrows. Freckles are a positive only when you don't have them, etc.

People want what they don't have. I think that captures most of it. I imagine that there is some women out there who is perfectly comfortable with her body. I would guess she is trans, though.

especially Indian mothers, having straight hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, is considered a huge plus

I am from this culture, as is my whole family. I have never heard of straight hair being a particular influence on anyone's desires. Non-brown eyes as well are extremely extremely rare (my aunt has green eyes, other than that I can probably count on my hands the number of people I've seen with them back home) and even when people give a damn about it it's mostly for women rather than men.

Same with fair skin. Fair skin is a massive plus yes, but again more so for women than men and also it's only a plus because fair skin is associated with being higher caste (not universally true but that's the association). However this only extends to the point where the fair skin makes you mimic a high caste, being albino gets you no benefits at all. Same with being whiter than a Mediterranean, at that point your skin is so pale that it's very clear you're an outsider who's not even part of the caste system, and that gets you back down to bringing no beneifts. An Italian could benefit from "fair skin", a Nordic will not.

One of my earliest memories is my mother telling me (when I was around 3) that when I grow up I will marry an educated, intelligent girl who is a Muslim. She told me that if the girl was not Muslim but really loved me, she would convert, and if she didn't that was a sign it wasn't true love. (the Muslim bit is a stand in for similar cultural values, plenty of Muslims have different cultural values to me and would not make a good fit, my parents would also not be happy if I got a Muslim girl from a family that drank alcohol).

For a long time I was poisoned by western propaganda and scoffed at this, why did it matter whether she converted to Islam or I converted to her religion? For after all love is love and the situation is symmetric. I even went so far as to hurt my mother by saying that it wasn't a given that my children would be Muslim (this is one of the big regrets I have). However now that I have grown up and become wiser I have realized the value of what she spoke of, and now not only will I not marry a non-Muslim woman but if she converts I will rightfully place more conditions on her expected behavior compared to a woman who was born Muslim (no different to how banks charge more interest on loans from poor people compared to rich people). After having a good heart, cultural and values fit is the most important thing needed for a successful marriage (even more so than similar intelligence levels).

Among Indians, especially Indian mothers, having straight hair, blue eyes, and fair skin, is considered a huge plus.

Okay, what? That is a seemingly absurd characterization. Genuinely, how much interactions with Indians in the west have you had? Or is it with a single particular subgroup of Indians?

Legitimately have no idea how the blue eyes thing is, but it sounds like you're basing this statement off of particular north Indian subgroup where you noticed this and where there are blue eyes in a small portion of them, but as you well know, most of India has nobody with blue eyes outside of a tiny portion of the population amongst a small portion of the northern Indian population near the pakistani border closer to the middle east. Amongst the rest of the population this isn't even a consideration since it's not something seen.

Hair... Like I'm genuinely a bit confused at how you're making such a judgement? Like there are people with straight hair, wavy hair, and curly hair who are considered beautiful men in many of India's film industries. Like if there's a preference for straight hair, it's like the same as the preference for straight hair as a factor in defining a hot white man as defined white women in America, where I'm super unsure about it, but the fact that there are more straight haired white men suggests there is some preference, but it's not significant by any measure. And nowhere near as significant to actually say is a huge factor. Also, like most Indian men have straight hair? All in all super confused tbh.

Most Indians, at least in Indians in America, the majority of whom originated from the Indian tech immigration boom during the 90's and early 00's are fairly religious and still quite traditional. Now if you're speaking about the demographics of Indians in the UK or the ones that immigrated from a different demo prior to if they're Christian instead of Hindu or Muslim then things might be off, but most of the Indians in America are from that tech immigration group. Those were Indians coming from many different class backgrounds, but because of the meritocratic nature of becoming a software engineer meant that this wave included a much larger portion of immigrants from lower classes. Lower classes that tend to be much more religious and traditional than the higher cosmopolitan class of Indians that historically was able to immigrate.

Most immigrant Indian parents, yes, prefer fair skin, but fair skin within the Indian demographic. This isn't a sliding scale where the white skin of white people makes up for the fact that they are not Indian. For most of this demo, bringing home a White partner is not seen as a positive thing. A significant number of mothers and fathers care about religion and culture and with a white partner they, probably rightfully, see as the end of the line for their religions and culture being meaningfully passed on as anything more than just a name and a couple of parties.

I've seen families go ballistic where huge rifts were created when children brought home and introduced their parents to non Hindu partners that were still Indian. I know a guy introduce his parents to his ivy league college sweetheart, a beautiful White woman who was great in both character and background. Was all around a standout person, worked as a lawyer and came from a semi-wealthy family. None of that mattered. The family only started speaking somewhat more recently after they had a kid, and still despite that speaking with the guy he says his relationship with his parents is irrevocably broken. It'll get better, but they aren't ever really going to forgive him. I've seen similar things with women who brought home both White and Asian men.

I mean even if you bring home a partner that's Indian and the same religion, that might cause problems. It's not a simple situation. People love grouping India as this single large diverse country, but it's basically like taking the European Union and saying that everyone is European. In some ways the most recent period under Mughal and then British rule did make Indians closer and more unified because of the single external enemy, but that period was nowhere nearly long enough, nor are organized enough to break down those regional divisions and differences fully. Historically India was not united with a huge empire for most of the subcontinent's history. Similar to Europe where outside of brief periods India was a region divided into dozens of separate kingdoms with different languages, cultures and history. Much of India speaks different languages and there are broad strokes of cultural similarities like how Europeans are similar to each other, but there are huge swathes of differences. People from different regions speak different languages, they interpret cultural traditions often radically differently, have different ways they practice religion, ect.

In the modern day this factor matters less and the first gen immigrants have resigned themselves to that their child does not have the same care for regional differences, caste differences as much, ect that their generation learnt and grew up with, but there is still a decent implied assumption amongst most Indians that their kids will bring home an Indian of some sort. If they don't, most will not look on that with a great view. Even if that person is taller, more beautiful, more successful, ect than an Indian person, the Indian partner is preferable. Now of course it's not like parents prefer a loser Indian to a great non Indian, but what I'm trying to convey is that the non Indian person has to be significantly better for people to accept them and even then to some level they will never be as welcomed.

Sidenote: I'd say that fair skin is something that Indian parents prefer and care about a lot more. Those that were born and grew up in the West probably also carry some a fair skin preference, but it's nowhere near as large. The demo that grew up in the West grew up without the same level of cultural baggage and was very explicitly raised in a more diverse environment that I can see has made them much less as intense about that factor. It's something people care about yes, but it's not as big as many of the other factors in attractiveness like height, attractive facial features, charm, bmi, career, ect.

You really don't know how non Asian immigrant parents work, do you?

The increase in "status" does not make up for the loss in culture and religion that parents foresee. For a significant majority of Middle Eastern and Indian parents, especially in America, it is at the least a slight negative to marry a person outside of their group if not an outright disaster. The more progressive ones will care less, but it's not at all considered a status bump by any measure. Bringing home a partner not from their group is something that will result in huge, often irrevocable, rifts between families.

Genuinely thought this would be common knowledge at this point. Even with their sons, these are communities that dislike them marrying white women. Kumail Nanjiani famously made a whole movie about the story about him and his wife getting together and his parents in that movie were probably much nicer in their significant disapproval than they were in real life.

You really don't know how non Asian immigrant parents work, do you?

In fact, I dated a devout Hindu woman whose family were (ethnically) Indian and upper middle-class (doctors, lawyers etc.). Now, she's married to a white Hindu guy who is better suited to her spiritually than I would have been. On the other hand, that wasn't in America, and I don't know the situation there. And of course, almost by definition, more conservative families will be more concerned about a white son-in-law: that's a semi-defining trait of a conservative non-white family.

Islam would be a different issue. I've never known a Muslim to marry outside of their faith, though obviously I've known plenty Muslim girls to hookup casually and often secretively with non-Muslim whites.

Anyway, if you look again, the conversation was about what African parents consider high status, not what Indians/Arabs/whatever consider high status for their children.

Sure, but the point is that in non-Christian cultures this is tempered by religious status, to a Muslim a daughter (often even a son, especially if she doesn't convert) marrying out is very low status and grounds for communal embarrassment. Even some East Asians (more Koreans and Japanese than Chinese, ime) tend to at least mildly disapprove of a white partner for their child.

And it also isn't true for African American culture. Most wouldn't disown a white son-in-law or anything but it's not really 'high status' at all in middle class black circles for your son or daughter to marry a white person.

I think affluent African parents are more relaxed about their kids marrying white than many Asian (especially South Asian) and Arab/North African parents, possibly for cultural and religious (they're usually Christian) reasons.

Since you mention the UK, it is worth noting that the 1st priority for middle-class Black African parents is that their kid shouldn't marry a Jamaican, which is a likely outcome if they pick up an African-American-inspired generic "Black" identity at school.

Well I'm almost 40 and didn't sleep with my first white woman until I was 35 or so. I can't speak for the UK, nor can I speak for most of America outside of South Florida, but here at least most black / white interracial couples just seem like normal middle or lower middle class people. I've never met any like the you three you described but I don't have an overly large social circle.

White guys with black wives (whether American or Islander) is common here. So much so that I've never heard it exclaimed about at all. Sure I've heard people be derogatory but people are derogatory about everything. It always had to do with not liking one of the couple and not about who they were with.

I no longer have any interest in black American women however. Still, everyone should be seen as an individual so who knows what I'll do in my 40's.

Now that you mention it, the only girl to directly ask me for a date was Chinese. And I think 25.

Ohio Republicans' Inexplicable & Baffling Abortion Blunder

I support expansive abortion access purely as a matter of practical considerations because of how legal prohibitions encourage horrific black market alternatives. I part ways with the pro-choice crowd when they respond to a difficult morality question with flippant dismissal. So at least from that standpoint, I sympathize with the earnest pro-life crowd because they're helplessly witnessing what is (by their definitions) a massive genocide made worse by the fact that it's legally-sanctioned.

So if you're in that unenviable position, what are your options? The major practical problem is that abortion restrictions have been and continue to be extremely politically unpopular. The Dobbs decision generated a lot of what basically amounted to legislative reshuffling at the state level. Some states had trigger laws banning abortions, that awakened from their long slumber only for courts, legislatures, or voter referendums to strike them back down to sleep.

Ohio's law banning abortions when a fetus heartbeat could be detected (typically occurs within 6-7 weeks of pregnancy) was struck down by a court last year, and so currently abortions there are legal up until "viability" (typically understood to be 22 weeks). On top of that, a referendum was set to be voted on this upcoming November election which would solidly enshrine abortion access within the Ohio state constitution (worth noting that this is the only referendum on the ballot). Given where public opinion is at on this issue, the amendment is virtually guaranteed to be approved by voters. What can you do to stop this train?

Ohio Republicans responded in a very bizarre and inexplicable manner (part of a pattern it seems). Apparently aware that the November referendum was going to be a shoe-in, they organized a whole special election in August as a preemptive maneuver to increase various thresholds for constitutional amendments, including raising the passing percentage from 50% to a 60% supermajority. That measure failed in the special election held yesterday, with 57% of voters against it.

Where to start? First, asking voters to vote against themselves was always going to be a challenge, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes the rhetoric supporters of Issue 1 had to resort to:

One talking point has been that it protects the Ohio Constitution from out-of-state interests. (For instance: "At its core, it's about keeping out-of-state special interest groups from buying their way into our constitution," Protect Women Ohio Press Secretary Amy Natoce told Fox News.) Another has been that it signals trust in elected officials to safeguard citizen interests, rather than letting a random majority of voters decide what's best. (The current simple-majority rule for amending the state constitution "sends the message that if you don't like what the legislature is doing, you can just put it on the ballot, and soon the constitution will be thousands of pages long and be completely meaningless," Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told Politico in a prime example of this tack.)

Some of the TV ads the supporters ran were so incoherent. I don't know how representative this particular example is but the 30-second spot avoids saying anything at all about abortion and instead argues that voting yes on Issue 1 would somehow...protect kids from trans drag queens in schools? The fuck? I guess they knew that "vote yes on Issue 1 to keep abortion restricted" wasn't going to be a winning message so this tangent was the only option.

Even if somehow Issue 1 had anything to do with gender identity indoctrination in schools or whatever (if anyone can explain this please do!) it bears repeating that the only referendum on the ballot in November was about enshrining abortion access. Voters are dumb but they're not that dumb.

Just this last January Ohio Republicans passed HB 458 which eliminated almost all August special elections, but then they insisted on passing another law walking that back specifically to make sure Issue 1 got its very own election. The gambit apparently was to help its chances by leveraging low voter turnout in special elections. This too is baffling, because the timing gimmick very likely energized the "Democrats' highly educated neurotic base" as my boy Yglesias so eloquently put it. Also, the type of voter that is willing to show up to a special election is not going to be the type that is inclined to wrest control away!

None of these decisions made any sense. By investing into a preemptive referendum to raise the threshold, they loudly advertised they knew their issue was going to lose in November. By carving out an exception for an August election, they demonstrated they knew they couldn't win unless they act like a Turkish ice cream man with voters. By conspicuously avoiding talking about abortion, they're acknowledging their policy position's unpopularity.

I'm again acknowledging that the pro-life crowd faces an unenviable challenge in advocating for their position, and clearly their attempts at persuasion over the last several decades have not been panning out. But who actually thought the blatant gimmickry described above was actually going to work? All it did was showcase how weak they must be if the only tool in their arsenal was comically inept subterfuge.

There's another aspect to this whole thing that might reveal more of what's going on. Examples of dramatic gerrymanders like Wisconsin's, have been in the news a lot recently. At least among people I talk to, this seems to make a lot of the left think of state legislatures as illegitimate and non-representative. For example, I think this is what drove the panic around the independent state legislature supreme court case earlier this year. Even more telling, a lot of the celebration I've heard around this vote has been almost more "screw gerrymandering" than about abortion!

It's therefore not completely unreasonable to expect a question about changing how much power state legislatures have to polarize along partisan lines and unite more of the right than something purely about abortion might. You can see some of this in the steelman that's part of the comment below.

The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control. Most people on the left already want this, so it shouldn't be hard to get bipartisan support. Then way more people will use it, way fewer accidental pregnancies occur, and actual abortion rates plummet regardless of whether it's legal or illegal.

This might have the bonus affect of making it much easier to pass restrictions on abortion afterwards. If fewer people have needed one or known someone who has needed one, and the only people who ever get abortions are morons who forgot to take their free birth control, people in general will be less sympathetic. Lazy people just using abortion as birth control will have cheaper alternatives and so care less. People worried about being forced to give birth to an unwanted child in some hypothetical future will be less worried because they can just use their free state-provided birth control. And the messaging that pro-life people just want to enslave women as breeders forced to give birth against their will just dissolves away because we're actively trying to prevent them from getting pregnant.

But even if nothing else changes legislatively, even if the silly pollitical warmakers would consider this a loss because the pro-choice get everything they want, this would be a massive win for pro-life and effective altruism. I don't think people trying to have tons of promiscuous sex "deserve" to have their degenerate lifestyles subsidized by my tax dollars, but I'm going to offer it anyway because "deserves" matter less than saving lives.

Yeah, I fully endorse this approach. This is why I added the "earnest" qualifier when I talk about the pro-life crowd, because I can't who exactly supports abortion restrictions because they genuinely believe it's akin to murder, and who supports it for other less defensible reasons such as wanting to discourage sexual promiscuity. The argument against promiscuity gets undercut severely the less risk sex has, and it's a big tell about the true motivation here given how much Christian groups opposed the HPV vaccine for example.

Promiscuity can't be bad and undesirable regardless of risk?

The promiscuous shouldn't be ashamed because they're syphilitic, they should be ashamed because they're whores. It's not the risk it's the depravity.

I didn't say it can't be bad, just that the argument against it gets cut severely. It's much more convincing to much more people to say "don't have sex because you'll get pregnant or get painful disfiguring warts" versus "don't have sex because it's depraved"

Sure, the whore is concerned with the negative impact of their behavior on them. I wouldn't expect them to be particularly moved by the argument that tolerance of the behavior is bad for everyone.

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I don't think that's the correct framing of how pro-lifers view these issues. Pro-lifers generally believe abortion is bad because it's murder, and also, and on an unrelated note some believe that things like the HPV vaccine and free contraception are bad because they encourage or enable or normalize sexual promiscuity. They're two separate issues, and they approach them from different perspectives.

Yes, I understand that. The problem is that the tension between the two issues will remain. If they somehow were presented with the hypothetical of eliminating all abortions but all women transform into insatiable sluts, I gather that some people will accept the bargain, but maybe for others it falls beyond their relative elasticity preference. I don't think either is an incoherent or inconsistent position to hold. But because of the correlation between "anti-abortion" and "anti-promiscuity", it also makes it hard to tell when specific objections are genuine and when they are just a pretext serving cover for the other.

The pro-life movement makes a lot more sense if you model the people behind it as being opposed to recreational sex (and an open/libertine approach to it) rather than abortion. Free birth control would be seen as signalling societal support for it in a way that might even exceed abortion access (which, despite the fierceness of its proponents, still is kept somewhat under wraps and considered a too sensitive topic to sell in convenience stores, advertise on TV and hand out for free to college freshers).

That model would predict that people would be equally opposed to all forms of birth control, which is not what we observe. You don't see people having angry protests outside condom manufacturers and calling them murderers the way you do at abortion clinics.

It makes more sense if you model pro-life as following directly from the personhood of fetuses, and this belief being highly correlated with religion, which in turn is correlated with a separate but lesser opposition to birth control. And also correlated with being deontologists and thus irrationally unwilling to tradeoff on a tacit endorsement for promiscuous sex that's already happening in exchange for solving the mass murder of millions of unborn babies.

Why does birth control need to be free? Besides the pro-life movement opposes birth control. But it’s also like $10-20 a month for birth control. People are being ridiculous if that needs to be publicly funded.

Besides the pro-life movement opposes birth control.

That's precisely my point. It needs to change. A lot of people are lazy and stupid, or just poor, and those are the people most likely to also be too lazy to pull out or time when they have unprotected sex, or think about long term consequences like pregnancy. The pro-life movement needs to be on the forefront of not only providing and promoting free birth control, but pressuring people to use it. Don't shame people for having premarital sex, shame people for having unprotected premarital sex, because that's the kind that actually causes harm.

If you're a rational person who plans ahead, I don't think there's a large practical difference between $10-20 per month and just free, for something as impactful as birth control. But if you are lazy and impulsive there's a huge difference between not having condoms in your pocket and having sex anyway because you want to get laid, versus having a pile of condoms in your cabinets because the government and/or pro life movement keeps mailing them to you. Or maybe they just keep having sex all the time without condoms but all of the women have IUDs because those are free now and they got tired of people pressuring them to please get one. Or maybe it becomes a rite of passage for a girl to get one on her 18th birthday or something and it's just normal for everyone to have them until they actually want kids.

If people were smart and responsible, none of this would be necessary. But also the abortion rate would be near 0 already. The fact that it's not is pretty clear evidence that people are not smart and responsible.

The pro-life movement needs to be on the forefront of not only providing and promoting free birth control, but pressuring people to use it.

Condoms are outside of the capability of most abortion-getters to use. Hormonal birth control is just early abortion.

Hormonal birth control is just early abortion.

Which kind? There are kinds that make you miscarriage after the egg has been fertilized, in which case I'm inclined to agree with you. But there are kinds that prevent ovulation in the first place, in which case it's no different from abstinence or condom use, at least as far as life is concerned, since no child is conceived in the first place which could then die.

Most prevent implantation, not ovulation. IDK the ones that even prevent ovulation.

Are you talking about like the morning after pill? Because those are bad, but I'm referring to the ones that prevent women from ovulating during pregnancy so they don't just keep conceiving babies month after month while already pregnant. I know they make IUDs that do that, but there might be pills for it to.

I actually am not super familiar with the habits of promiscuous people and their typical birth control preferences, so "most" might not be the right phrase to use here. But if it turns out that most forms of birth control are abortive, but some aren't, that just increases the potential benefit of a pro-life promotion and subsidization of the ethical ones. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $20 for non-conceiving hormones, and they don't think fetuses are people, they're likely to take the abortion pills. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $0 for non-conceiving hormones because the government and/or pro-life charities pay the $20, then no child gets conceived in the first place, and thus none die. Assuming that the goal is actually to prevent the conception and subsequent deaths of fetuses because they die, and not just to increase the number of childbirths, this seems like a massive win to me.

Now maybe it would be healthier for society and relationships for people to just not have promiscuous sex in the first place, but that ship has sailed, pragmatically there's nothing we can do to fix that, and it seems much less of a priority to me than the millions of deaths at stake that free non-abortive birth control could prevent.

But from first principles then they wouldn’t be pro-life. Might as well just support abortion if they adopt your beliefs. Like I wouldn’t oppose abortion or euthanasia or a host of things if I didn’t also not believe in birth control.

I don’t think lower Iq or poor people are unable to not have sex. If anything promoting religion would give them simple ideas on abstinence and why they are doing it.

Simple first principles:

(1): Human lives are inherently valuable for their own sake, not just as instrumental value towards some economic or political end.

(2): Human fetuses are human and alive in physical form in a way that satisfies the criteria for (1).

(3): Imaginary hypothetical humans who do not exist in any physical form are not inherently valuable unless and until they come into being

All of these are axiomatically independent: you could form a coherent belief structure out of any combination of them. (1)+(2) implies pro-life. (3) makes abortion meaningfully distinct from preventative birth control. I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of people across political and religious beliefs agree with (3) in practice, which is why they don't advocate that celibate people be treated the same as serial killers. Even religious fundamentalists who are adamantly against birth control and in favor of having lots of children don't think that failing to procreate is literally equivalent to murder. Only weird straw-utilitarians who want to tile the universe with hedonium or literally maximize the number of living humans to the exclusion of all else would reject (3).

So then, conditional on people accepting (3), we can broadly categorize "pro life" people as accepting both (1) and (2), and "pro choice" people as rejecting one or both. Theoretically you could find weird exceptions where someone rejects (2) but is pro life anyway because they want to mysogynistically control women's bodies, or someone who accepts all three but only a weak version of 1 such that the right to bodily autonomy outweighs millions of valuable fetus lives. But in practice most of the contention is in (2): pro-choice people reject the premise that fetuses are meaningfully human in a way that makes them valuable and gives them rights. And to a lesser extent they contest (1), a lot of atheists think that human rights are derived from the State and not inherent to personhood thus non-citizens who the State chooses not to protect and can't advocate for themselves do not have inherent rights, while more religious people think that rights are inherent, inalienable, and God-given. Although the existence of God is neither necessary nor sufficient for human rights to be inherent and inalienable, the beliefs do tend to be strongly correlated, as postulating an objective morality without a higher authority to define it requires some epicycles and philosophical justification.

All this to say... murder and abstinence are incredibly different, and nobody treats them the same, not even you. That's why you aren't panicking about not having unprotected sex right now the same way you would be if you were accidentally killing someone right now.

It needs to change.

Why?

The reason they oppose both didn't. It just doesn't align with your utilitarian conception. It's not about "harm" for them and it never has been. You're not going to convince people to change their strategy by retrofitting somebody else's ethics to what they're doing.

This is silly, you might as well tell Kantians they should lie in ways that make more people reasonable.

Maybe I should clarify my position as someone who is both pro-life and utilitarian. It is about "harm" for me, and a non-negligible proportion of pro-life people I have encountered. Human fetuses are human and alive, human life is good, death is bad. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Of course for a different non-negligible proportion of "pro-life" people it's about punishing people for their sins and forcing people to bear the consequences of their premarital sex.

I just wish my... subfaction? were more influential than the latter so we had more control over the movement and its messaging.

Is lack of access to birth control a factor in American abortion? As far as I know there is functionally no one in the US who lacks access to contraceptives.

A policy of strong arming sexually active teens into getting IUD’s affects the abortion rate, we know that. Seriously, that’s the study design for ‘giving out birth control reduces abortions’. But it doesn’t seem like this is an example of abortion because of lack of access to contraception, it seems like this is an example of teenagers being bad at calculating risk and condoms being disliked, neither of which tell us anything new.

If strong-arming them works to reduce abortions then do that. And quite a few adults are bad at calculating risk and dislike condoms, so strongarm them too. Somewhere around a million abortions happen each year, which means millions more are not using birth control. Whether that's from "access" or cost, or social acceptability, all of those are levers to push.

The point being, more birth control usage = fewer abortions = good, and most pro-life people are leaving hundred dollar bills on the floor by ignoring this avenue for solving the problem.

Isn’t birth control effectively free with some small time effort?

I think a related suggestion might be plausible, but there's a complication.

In the US, the bulk of the pro-life movement is religious, specifically Christian. There are certainly many individual exceptions, but the major organizing groups are either church-affiliated or formally secular but largely staffed by Christians. Where abortion is concerned, the Catholic part of the movement and the Evangelical Protestant part are entirely on the same page, but there is no similar agreement on birth control. Opposing birth control is part of Catholic dogma, while Evangelicals generally have no moral problem with contraceptives, so long as they are used within the context of otherwise proper sexual ethics.

That said, Evangelicals very much support the right of Catholics to follow their consciences on the issue, even if they differ on the object-level question. Catholic opposition to taxpayer-funded contraceptives is a given, and Evangelicals usually have other ideological reasons for opposing "free" stuff. So you'd likely have very minimal organized Christian support for taxpayer-funded contraceptives.

However, Evangelicals (and many American conservatives in general) have supported a related measure for pretty much the exact reasoning you lay out above--rescheduling oral contraceptives from prescription-based to over-the-counter. I would not expect Catholic support for this type of measure, but at least it doesn't raise the same conscience issues as direct subsidy.

In the US, the bulk of the pro-life movement is religious, specifically Christian.

I am not religious, and I understand the pro life movement completely. Hormonal birth control is just abortion by another means. Condoms will never work as a substitute for a semi-eugenic program of putting those implants into arms for most of the population getting abortions...and again, those are still abortions, just hormonally induced when the baby is like 64 cells.

I don't think this is true for standard birth control. I know it's true for the morning after pill but I think normal birth control stops ovulation

There were several comments that made the starting assumption that the pro-life movement in the US was solidly against birth control generally as well. This is untrue, hence my explanation above.

Let me define a few terms more tightly, while recognizing that they are sometimes (IMO) misused.

"Birth control" covers all methods of preventing, interrupting, or otherwise regulating pregnancy. "Contraceptive" is any method that prevents conception--the union of sperm and egg into zygote. Condoms and other barrier methods are examples. "Abortifacient" is any method that ends a pregnancy after the zygote is formed, including any method that prevents implantation in the uterus.

I'm aware that some hormonal birth control operates as an abortifacient by preventing implantation (Plan B, etc.), but the most common types of regularly-administered hormones (via pills, patch, implant, etc.) prevent ovulation. This would be a contraceptive, not an abortifacient.

While the Prog-Est oral program primarily inhibits ovulation, it also affects implantation and other portions of development of a healthy early pregnancy.

But if the Evangelicals unilaterally decided to support free birth control then, with bipartisan support from pro-choice people, it could get passed without requiring the Catholics to get on board. Maybe they'd perceive it as a betrayal or something, but they could still stand united on the abortion bad part.

I mean, evangelicals have lots of policy views that Catholics aren’t totally onboard with, so hitting defect just means they’ll get defected on.

The evangelicals would only support it if it were only free to married couples. They don't want abortions but they don't want sex out of wedlock either.

Why would Evangelicals support raising taxes and undermining freedom of conscience when a different policy choice is better? It's not about 'betraying allies'--though that's usually something to avoid when possible--but that Evangelicals actually have an array of moral and ideological preferences in addition to ending abortion, and should logically attempt to satisfy multiple preferences simultaneously first.

Yes, expanding access through OTC contraceptives is a more modest approach, but it should also accomplish much of the stated policy goal.

I would not expect Catholic support for this type of measure

Yeah, Pope Francis would have to change longstanding Catholic doctrine. That only happens every couple of years.

The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control.

Pro-life people are likely to be deontologists. Deontologists don't use expected value in such situations.

Then way more people will use it

I have doubts that most people who don't use birth control today do not do so because it is too expensive. I suspect that even if you dropped a free crate of condoms right beside every bed in the country you wouldn't get a factor of two reduction in the rate of unprotected sex. People don't use protection largely because they don't want to, because they don't want the side effects, or just don't care in the moment, and so on. It's not like birth control is a good like uncontaminated water.

I'm also imagining this initiative crossed with policies to arrest crashing birthrates, like ever-more-subsidized parental leave, and can only picture a motorist driving with one foot pressing on the gas and the other simultaneously pressing on the brakes. It may make one feel more secure to be actively exerting control in all directions at all times, but that has its costs, to be sure.

I suspect that even if you dropped a free crate of condoms right beside every bed in the country you wouldn't get a factor of two reduction in the rate of unprotected sex.

We actually kind of did that already by making Plan B over the counter along with a strong anti-natalist campaign aimed at youth. The results have been stunning. Relative to Gen X, teen pregnancy has been all but wiped out.

IMO this is the oddest thing about Dobbs and its aftermath. Abortion rates had already dropped to pre Roe levels. In light of ubiquitous contraception availability and the internet probably having provided far more sex-ed than any high school class abortion is nearing obsolescence outside of lizardman constant cases or medical necessity.

Now we're stuck with the fun part, figuring out how to convinced 20-something women with career ambitions that having a kid isn't A. borderline trashy or B. a life-ruining event.

We actually kind of did that already by making Plan B over the counter along with a strong anti-natalist campaign aimed at youth. The results have been stunning. Relative to Gen X, teen pregnancy has been all but wiped out.

Isn't that a result of falling testosterone levels / dropping sperm counts / chemicals in the water that are turning the freaking frogs gay? I was under the impression Zoomers aren't even having sex that much to begin with.

None of these decisions made any sense. By investing into a preemptive referendum to raise the threshold, they loudly advertised they knew their issue was going to lose in November. By carving out an exception for an August election, they demonstrated they knew they couldn't win unless they act like a Turkish ice cream man with voters. By conspicuously avoiding talking about abortion, they're acknowledging their policy position's unpopularity.

I don't think any of these things are an actual problem. Acknowledging your issue is unpopular doesn't make it more unpopular, as far as I can tell. So if there's no actual cost, why not try all the lines of defence you have available? Okay, they lost here, but they're in no different a situation than if they hadn't tried.

In my opinion, the actual smart strategic decision for pro-lifers in broadly pro-abortion jurisdictions would be to move abortion out of the field of legislation entirely and to concentrate on regulatory restriction pathways. E.g. establish in codes of conduct that doctors faced with situations directly impacting multiple patients (such as conjoined twins or pregnant mothers) need to act to promote the best health outcomes for both patients whenever possible. And then you use board review to take medical licences away from doctors that perform medically unnecessary abortions (while also ensuring you don't spook the normies by forcing women to carry pregnancies in genuinely life threatening situations). Encourage pro-lifers to get their kids to become doctors, make use of the large network of Catholic hospitals to promote pro-lifers into positions of prestige and power in the medical profession, etc.

In my opinion, the actual smart strategic decision for pro-lifers in broadly pro-abortion jurisdictions would be to move abortion out of the field of legislation entirely and to concentrate on regulatory restriction pathways.

Why wouldn't the regulatory approach face the same hurdles as the legislative approach?

Because for the little attention that legislation gets, regulation gets even less. A law is - or at least can be dumbed down to - a bright line rule. A regulatory approach is full of considerations and exceptions and maybes. It can be every bit as stifling (or even more so) than an actual prohibition, but the specific rules are cloudy and opaque and hard to organise against.

No one would have ever voted for a law that said "No new housing may be built". But we got systems that said "Sure, of course you can build new housing! Just as long as your Environmental Impact Statement is consistent with our Ecological Management Plan, and the floor area to height ratio falls within our guidelines, and you go through a local consultation process and respond to concerns from community members, and..."

[I've been in and out of the midwest over the last few months, so I've seen some of the coverage -- and lawn signs -- firsthand.]

I don't know how representative this particular example is but the 30-second spot avoids saying anything at all about abortion and instead argues that voting yes on Issue 1 would somehow...protect kids from trans drag queens in schools? The fuck? I guess they knew that "vote yes on Issue 1 to keep abortion restricted" wasn't going to be a winning message so this tangent was the only option.

I heard that one less often than the Farmers Growing Democracy version, but I don't think any of the Pro-Issue 1 coverage was willing to focus on the short-term abortion ramifications.

To steelman, though, there's a pretty widespread feeling among Red Tribe conservatives, where a lot of politically-charged matters have been started getting shoved through local direct democracy options, usually by a mix of obfuscating terminology and absolutely massive direct spending advocacy, kinda the flip side to the Prop 8 Discourse back in 2008.

This isn't a theoretical issue for Ohio, specifically: 2015 had a pair of conflicting constitutional amendment issues that were a confusing mess, followed by a 2018 constitutional initiative that was even more lopsided in terms of funding. These efforts hadn't succeeded yet, but they were getting increasingly close, for something that would have been very hard to reverse (and near-impossible to reverse quickly), despite often pretty stupid and badly-implemented targets.

There are pragmatic reasons to suspect trans stuff is likely to become a relevant topic in the near future, and that Ohio would be a relevant target for a variety of logistical reasons attracting coastal soft power (and maybe federal government funding), in ways where the sword would not cut both ways.

And there's special concerns that the Ohio GOP might want to get this change done before a potential 2024 general election that could be a landslide because of hefty turnout on one side of the aisle and decreased enthusiasm on the other, such as if the GOP Presidential candidate is a complete schmuck.

((Of course, the Ohio GOP is also filled with morons, so this might be a position that they hadn't considered.))

But, as you say, this also was very clearly trying to work the refs for the fall ballot, so even if it might have been a good idea in general a lot of people were not exactly impressed by it in this context. Which does not work well for a state with a lot of borderers. And the combination of removing signature cure time and of requiring signatures from every county near-guaranteed that this was eventually going to even bite the GOP in the tail down the road.

But who actually thought the blatant gimmickry described above was actually going to work?

I think the steelman is that they thought it was a long shot, but that the quick turn around time would at least slow some of the conventional ways that out-of-state pressure applied. If so, it didn't work well: there was a very strong effort from teacher's unions and the conventional party affiliates, because "call phones and hand out signs" is pretty much their bread-and-butter. But the No on 1 campaign wasn't anywhere near as polished or coordinated in terms of advertising space as normal, didn't have time to start any serious cancellation efforts against supporters (yet), and didn't spend all that it raised, so to some extent it probably achieved part of the target goal.

On the other hand, they're pretty likely to bring that cash to the November election, so something something briar patch.

This isn't a theoretical issue for Ohio, specifically: 2015 had a pair of conflicting constitutional amendment issues that were a confusing mess, followed by a 2018 constitutional initiative that was even more lopsided in terms of funding. These efforts hadn't succeeded yet, but they were getting increasingly close, for something that would have been very hard to reverse (and near-impossible to reverse quickly), despite often pretty stupid and badly-implemented targets.

Good call on reminding me about that marijuana referendum clusterfuck. I can definitely see a principled concern arguing in favor of some referendum restrictions given the potential for problems you've described.

where a lot of politically-charged matters have been started getting shoved through local direct democracy options, usually by a mix of obfuscating terminology and absolutely massive direct spending advocacy,

Having worked on paid local referendum campaigns, this is underselling both points.

  • When circulating petitions, we were actively told to lie to make the petition more palatable to whoever we spoke to, even implying that the bill did the exact opposite of what it actually said. I didn't do this, and I'd even just outright say "Oh, you don't want to sign this then" if it seemed they didn't support what it was, but others were all-in on the numbers game.
  • Petitioners were being paid $50/hour to circulate petitions. I don't want to think about how much money was sloshing around that campaign.

How many people in the year 2000 would have supported any of the woke stuff today? Even mass immigration is unpopular and has continuously been so. The left has done an incredible job at pushing the overtone window. They take positions that are unpopular and they fight and fight and fight until they are the status quo. Once things are the status quo people accept them and don't debate them much.

The right is stuck worried about polls and continuously compromises while never launching its own campaigns. The right needs to find new battle grounds, take positions that are impopular and fight to make them status quo. Gay marriage was not popular. Gay marriage lost and lost and lost. The left pushed and pushed and pushed.

The right needs to do the same and find newer more radical positions outside the mainstream and make them the mainstream.

Critical race theory dates back to the early 80s, and the wildly oversimplified explanation of that is that it took feminist critical theory and replaced "patriarchy" with "systemic racism".

Gay marriage was imposed by judicial fiat, but it didn't matter because its opposition was mostly shallow and gays, as it turns out, don't really marry that much so it changed little. No-fault divorce was a much bigger deal.

With abortion, the problem is that a huge number of women consider it their right and a large number have themselves had abortions. There's probably more social stigma to euthanizing unwanted kittens than having an abortion.

The right has been relatively successful with gun rights, though there's work to be done with the right to self defense and they're in danger of losing there. There's little point in owning a weapon if exercising self-defense lands you in prison.

Otherwise, the modern right has been stuck waiting for the left to screw up because its actual policy stances are mostly unpopular. Immigration? The right never actually delivers there, because a big chunk of its leadership are pro-immigration libertarians, and the optics of actually enforcing immigration law are generally bad. Crime is unpopular, but so is enforcing the law and imprisoning criminals. Fiscal conservatism (another thing the right seldom actually delivers on) is deadly unpopular.

The right's problem is that outside of the gun rights issue they have no cultural power and therefore no ability to move public opinion.

Not every pro-lifer is religious, but the anti-abortion movement is fundamentally a religious movement. If you analyze it the same way you analyze the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, or Black Lives Matter, you will see bizarre and inexplicable results.

Every year, the annual March for Life draws tens to hundreds of thousands of people to Washington DC. Nobody cares. Why do they do it? Has one single person ever waked by and thought, "Wow, those people sure do have an opinion. Maybe I should vote Republican?" The elements that we now know make protest effective (media support, implied threats, elite backing) are wholly absent.

The audience isn't you. The audience isn't voters or politicians. The audience is God.

22 So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the Lord. 23 Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” 26 And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” 27 Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. 28 Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” 29 Again he spoke to him and said, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” 30 Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” 31 He said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” 32 Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” 33 And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.

There were not ten righteous men in Sodom. If you were Abraham, and you had until election day to save Sodom from fire and brimstone, what would you do? Would you consult with leading Sodomite political theorists? Run cuneiform ads on clay tablets? Your best bet would be to do whatever you think God wants and hope you earn enough grace points to bail your friends out of trouble. If you were a kid going to Jesus Camp in the 90s and 2000s, then Donald Trump getting 3 Supreme Court Justices and overturning Roe v Wade looks like divine intervention. Obviously God wants you to close the deal right? Sure it will take a few more miracles, but if God can save Nineveh he can save America.

I think this is a good point, they’re expecting divine intervention and in any case, modern Christians are usually more pacifist about grand signals than various other groups.

A Look at Shame in Modern Society

Shame is in an interesting place in modern society. On the one hand, we've made the wise decision not to shame people into feeling bad about being extremely depressed or anxious, etc. This understanding has come from recognizing that a lot of the time, these feelings can make their conditions worse, thereby leading to increased suffering.

At the same time though, we have lost much of the utility of shame. Shame, in its traditional role, is to engender manners and create a very legible and trainable way for people to interact with each other. This is not a new concept, as Emily Post pointed out in her etiquette books. She talked about how the point of manners is to consider and focus on how the other person is feeling, and not to focus exclusively on your own desires.

I think the absence of this benefit of shame is why so much of modern society is characterized by vitriol and name-calling, etc. These are often symptoms of a deeper issue. A lot of this has to do with the norms of acceptable discourse online, where anonymity can sometimes contribute to a lack of empathy and understanding. It has gone out of fashion to shame people into talking or acting a certain way, even though there is a lot of social utility there.


How can we grapple with the two edges of shame, and find a way to have productive social discourse without burying people under piles of negative emotions?

Does it start with changing internet culture, and following the cancellation warrior's plan of making online anonymity a thing of the past?

Do we need to return to aristocratic training and virtues, making sure the elite at least have a legible, shared set of manners they can use to discuss fraught topics with each other?

Perhaps artificial intelligence will grow in capabilities to the point where we will talk to each other through an AI interface, which will automatically insert manners and promote productive discussion.

Where do you, dear reader, think that our society should go with regards to how we incorporate shame into our culture?

Perhaps artificial intelligence will grow in capabilities to the point where we will talk to each other through an AI interface, which will automatically insert manners and promote productive discussion.

I attempted that here for a while. It was hit or miss. Maybe I didn't spend enough time trying to really hammer out the kinks. But I felt like half the time the AI completely missed the thrust of my point, often omitting it entirely.

Maybe that just means there is no polite way to say what I was trying to say. A shame.

I think the main problem is the AI systems we have now are crude, and right at the beginning of their potential. I would be shocked if we didn't have this capability in, say, 3 to 5 years. Hell it's probably possible now with the right plugins/training set.

How can we grapple with the two edges of shame, and find a way to have productive social discourse without burying people under piles of negative emotions?

Why should we not bury people under negative emotion? That seems like the purpose of shaming no?

If the idea is that it shouldn't be too bad, then you've probably already lost . Shaming involves both a general (hopefully internalized) taboo and serious consequences when they're broken. My family doesn't have a lot of bastards because there is a general taboo that people internalize but also they know there'll be social consequences.

Not "scarlet letter" level but serious enough, especially factoring in that people depend on each other much more*. Without that people will eventually do as they like.

As for "productive social discourse": that might also be part of the problem. Part of the value of shame is that, if society sticks to it, people can't argue themselves out of it. It doesn't matter what Lizzo feels; a strong society will simply make it clear it's futile to complain and she should and will continue to feel bad about being fat until she changes. That's not necessarily something that's inculcated in a calm, reasoned debate.

This all leads to: You need to have a stable community and norms to have strong taboos. But Americans/Westerners can't seem to decide what norms or even basic beliefs they have and so much of the debate is about how to talk about talking about norms.

* Another probably insurmountable obstacle in the West. When I needed to find something or someone back home I had to call someone. The West has all sorts of impersonal systems that reduce the need to care about the opinions of others.

Why should we not bury people under negative emotion? That seems like the purpose of shaming no?

If the idea is that it shouldn't be too bad, then you've probably already lost . Shaming involves both a general (hopefully internalized) taboo and serious consequences when they're broken. My family doesn't have a lot of bastards because there is a general taboo that people internalize but also they know there'll be social consequences.

The general idea here is that we should not shame people into things that they cannot change. Unfortunately this devolves into which framing you want - as I mentioned in a comment above, some people think that being gay is a choice, others don't.

Unfortunately we just don't know at this point how much of our personality is a 'choice' and how much it's baked into our genetic makeup, or 'identity' as progressives would call it.

There are some meta-analyses in the psychology literature that suggest that environment does actually have a strong effect on personality, even well into adulthood, but not that strong in early childhood or old age.

Perhaps based off of this analysis at least, we should shame people from the age of say, 5-40 or so, then leave folks alone after they reach a certain age since their personalities are more set.

Now with that being said, we know for a fact that psychedelic substances dramatically increase openness to experience as a trait, so if we truly want to have 'diversity training' with older executives that works well, we might need to slip them some mushrooms. I don't think this would be a good outcome of course, but I do think that as we developed our technology and understanding of personality, as well as study psycho-active substances more, we will realize we can do a lot more to change our minds than we previously thought.

@self_made_human, I'm actually curious if you know much about the development of personality changing medicine right now?

@self_made_human, I'm actually curious if you know much about the development of personality changing medicine right now?

Uh, the closest thing that comes to mind is psychiatry meds for things like anxiety, ADHD, depression and the like. To the extent that they're part of one's personality, that's the closest you can get. Certainly a schizophrenic who desists on the drugs has had a rather large shift in personality.

There's preliminary evidence that Ozempic is a "good habits" drug, since not only does it reduce weight and food cravings, it also seems to reduce the urge to use nicotine and alcohol too, and maybe gambling, but don't quote me on that.

On the less legit side of the spectrum, you can make a nerd do coke, or make someone try LSD. The latter does lead to longterm personality changes like openness to experience and so on.

Ahh gotcha. Yeah Ozempic is pretty amazing at least in preliminary results. I'm fascinated to see if AI will drive faster drug discovery.

Alas, the psych meds we have right now are pretty terrible. Adderall can be fun, but not great for long term health or stability IMO.

I like this sentiment. Overly caring about people's feelings seems to be a particular failure mode of modern discourse. Oftentimes your feelings are simply incorrect, and you should literally just go for a jog instead of caring about them.

We have a lot of shame today. There’s a lot of shame involving conformity to fashion, hairstyle, mannerisms, schooling, slang, and so on. Shaming is not wagging your finger and yelling “shame”, shaming is the negative side of every social judgment. You cannot be on the losing side of a social judgment without risking shame, that’s just what the emotion is. When a student does badly in school or gets a bad hairstyle, they are negatively socially evaluated by peers, and then they feel shame.

What we should obviously be doing, if we want to evolve as a people, is only shame people for moral things. This means we stop socially evaluating people for things that don’t matter in terms of morality, and only evaluate them on things which they have will over.

Yeah I like this one. Good point.

On the one hand, we've made the wise decision not to shame people into feeling bad about being extremely depressed or anxious, etc.

I'm not convinced that this is the case. The practice of shaming simply seems to be shifting towards two norms:

(1) Don't punch down. Intersectionality makes this norm very complicated and it may be in decline - I don't hear prople saying it any more, whereas they did say it about 5 years ago when trying to explain why e.g. cruel jokes about white people are ok.

(2) Only shame people for things they choose. So sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia etc. are worthy targets of shaming (at least if someone doesn't check themselves after being "educated") but being fat, gay, transgender, violent (if sufficiently marginalised) etc. are not choices and thus beyond the scope of acceptable shame.

Being fat is a choice, to the point where excluding it is an unprincipled exception.

Indeed: you can shame a redneck for being fat, because they chose to do it.

The laws of physics require that to get fat, you have to eat. If you don't eat enough calories, you won't get fat. No amount of genetics can overcome physics.

Amazing how a simple series of semaglutide injections boosts one's willpower into the stratosphere.

I agree here, and most of the other comments make similar points on this front. I've got to rethink my formulation of shame and how it has changed over time.

This also plays into how what is a 'choice' has changed over time. This framing actually sheds a lot of light on why gay and LGBT activists were so insistent that being homosexual is not a 'choice,' it's determined at birth. That way you couldn't shame gay people under this framework.

Seems like the whole transgender 'identity' thing is similar. Before if someone wanted to crossdress, you just told them that's a bad or wrong choice. But now it's somehow indefinably a quality they can't control.

I have a hypothesis that it's to do with trait agreeableness + openness, which are common traits on the left. Agreeable people are more forgiving and accepting of others. Lovely, except that they are also more likely to do so in a way that infantilises the people they sympathise with. Disageeable and low openness people, on the other hand, are very willing to respect other's agency but also more likely to want a society that is "pure", "clean", "respectable" etc. and hence tend to become social conservatives.

A free society depends on social attitudes finding mediums between these social attitudes, where people are seen as having the right to make bad choices (within limits e.g. shooting or robbing people) and the responsibility to suffer consequences of these (e.g. don't expect society to fund your drug habit with a basic income).

That's partly why, though I haven't thought that homosexuality or transphobia were morally wrong since Limp Bizkit was an important force in popular music, I have always been annoyed at the attitude that these behaviours should be tolerated because they can't help doing it (often conflated with the relevant preference being innate) or because they not really bad anyway (fine, but that's accepting them, not tolerating them).

This infantilisation becomes really dangerous when it's applied to e.g. black criminals ("They can't help it - a racist society made them this way!") both for their victims who are denied justice, and through creating a society where young black men experience the tyranny of low expectations.

But now it's somehow indefinably a quality they can't control.

Same as what happened for homosexuality. They just made it up1. No one bothers arguing for it anymore, now that the political victories have been won solidly enough that there appears to be no chance of it ever going back. In fact, various trans/queer movements are going back to chip away at this claim, so when it "somehow" becomes a choice again, don't be too confused.

1 - For potentially the clearest example of this, go to their own words. Check out the APA's brief in Obergefell, where they had the opportunity, on the nation's highest stage (for the political result they desperately wanted), to lay out the absolute best scientific case with the absolute best evidence available on the matter. They cited an opinion poll.

The recent huge increase in the percentage of people who are LGBT suggests that at least bisexuality is a choice for 1 in 5 women. The number of gays is up 4x, and lesbians 11x since the silent generation.

The new narrative is that orientation is a spectrum. Perhaps this is true. Male homosexual acts were commonplace in Ancient Greece and Rome and I think this suggests that at least 50% of men would engage in homosexual acts if it were fully normalized. This seems very high bit I can't explain the ancient world without people being quite flexible.

I’m not sure I agree that stopping shaming for depression and anxiety was a wise decision. More generally, it seems that “society” is incapable of transitioning from “shaming a behavior” to “tolerating a behavior”, without the pendulum swinging way too far the other way and outright celebrating various forms of antisocial behavior. I might just be too internet-culture-war-brained, but the big examples of formerly shamed behaviors like homosexuality, transgender, various mental illnesses, to older culture war fights about how women should dress or whether people should have sex before marriage tend to immediately flip from general intolerance, to encouragement and celebration, without much of a “tolerate but don’t encourage” phase. It seems like you basically can’t get rid of shame, you can only change the polarity of it. Now you are shamed for being a *phobe, or for not having the “basic human decency” to accommodate people’s questionable self-diagnosed mental illnesses. Are there any examples of this not being the case, maybe for more banal, less politically charged behaviors? The only thing I can think of maybe is obesity, where most people agree it’s rude to outright shame people for being fat, but the “celebrating fatness” movement hasn’t really taken off

Maybe there's no "celebrating fatness" movement per se, but the last time I was in the US (over a year ago) I was struck with the girth of the women used as models in the women's clothing section--I feel the need to point out I noticed this peripehrally; I was not myself shopping for a brassiere. I should have taken photos of the posters. Maybe it's because I live in an Asian country where women (and men) are generally more relatively petite and thus the models here are more lithe and reflect the populace, but it was jarring to see women I would consider overweight modeling lingerie in six-foot posters.

The heyday of body-positivity on social media was a couple of years back, it's said (I'm not observing it -relating what others have said) The things those fools were promoting - such as 'listening to your body' for when to eat lead to pretty much uncontrolled weight gain in the long run. In the end even the crowd figures that out.

Maybe there's no "celebrating fatness" movement per se

Some ad agencies definitely went on that bandwagon and are staying there, however, once popular support ceases it'll probably go away. This sexual harassment lawsuit against Lizzo won't help the cause either.

I had no idea there was a 'BBC Pidgin ' Fascinating.

The best example of this, to me, is found in the term "fat shaming". The first time I heard it, I genuinely couldn't make sense of it, I was sincerely puzzled by what was meant. To me, being fat is plainly a bad thing to be, is a thing that people become due to their own actions, and therefore it is shameful to be fat. If someone engaged in self-control or exercise, they wouldn't be fat, but they are fat, so that is shameful. What an unsophisticated fool I was! If we can't even apply shame to something so straightforwardly negative, I don't see much hope for shaming behavior that's more equivocal.

A lot of the discussion about shame in the US revolves around fat-shaming, but I think we would be better served to directly shame unhealthy eating and unnecessary lethargy. As far as I see it, the difference between culture in the US and Asia is threefold: (1) It's acceptable in Asia to tell someone if they gained/lost weight. (2) People in Asia don't drive everywhere, but walk / bike / public transport more. (3) People in Asia eat a lot more vegetables and a lot less carbs / refined sugars.

Outside of elementary school, just what level of fat shaming (or maybe it's more accurate to talk about fat bullying) has ever existed in any Western society? I wonder. Also, how much of objectively existing fat shaming was/is directed at fat men specifically?

If you look at ads from the 30s/40s/50s fat shaming was rife.

Are you referring to media depictions such as this? Because I'd say that maybe falls into the category of benevolent sexism, or whatever it's called.

Problem is "self-control or exercise" is not a solution to fatness in modern food environment like it maybe was for some king or rich merchant in the past. General populace just can't beat hyperstimulus, not without semaglutide at least. Fat shaming is bad because it isn't solving the issue of population becoming more and more obese it just makes lifes of unhealthy people more miserable.

Fat shaming is bad because it isn't solving the issue of population becoming more and more obese it just makes lifes of unhealthy people more miserable.

Maybe, maybe not. We don't particularly know.

Can you talk a bit more about what you mean by a modern food environment? As far as I know, fatness isn't evenly distributed across populations, and it's not that hard to find subgroups and cultures with much less obesity than we observe as the baseline in America.

I specifically said "modern" instead of "American" or even "first world" one because food environment is quite globalized and obesity rates are rising world-wide, start points and speed differ but they rise nonetheless even in Japan. European 25% isn't very reassuring compared to American one of 40% if 20 years ago it was 15%.

One bit of anecdata I've heard over and over again, is people moving to Europe, not changing their diet what so ever, and losing weight. Because Europe doesn't put high fructose corn syrup in everything.

Don't you dare dunk on my Leberkäse!

I've heard the same thing, but for Japan and Vietnam. It's worth noting that obesity in Europe is climbing rapidly as well. They are about 20 years behind the U.S.

Even Japan/Vietnam is seeing rising obesity but they seem to be much more resistant.

Some theorize that chemicals in the drinking water causing obesity. Areas where drinking water comes from agricultural runoff such as the Mississippi Delta have extremely high obesity while high altitude areas have less than would be expected from socioeconomic conditions. As far as I know, no one has adequately explained this phenomenon.

It seems relevant that adults living in the Mississippi delta basically don’t go outside for 4-5 months of the year.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that the Mississippi Delta is extremely hot and humid for a big part of the year while high altitude areas like Denver tend to have a lot of healthy people who specifically moved there for outdoor sports. They say it holds in other countries too but don't mention whether those low lying areas also have agricultural runoff.

Some theorize that chemicals in the drinking water causing obesity.

And they dismiss that people eat more calories and move less - and look for some grand mystery. There is none, CICO is the solution.

Of course CICO "works". No one is claiming that the laws of physics don't apply. It's just not a useful abstraction for maintaining weight in the real world.

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite. Imagine being hungry and tired all the time. But that is what required for these people to maintain a healthy weight. Naturally, they can't do it.

In the past, people maintained their weight with less effort than today. Willpower didn't magically collapse in the 1970s. There has been a change in the natural environment.

There has been a change in the natural environment.

Food become more available, more palatable and cheaper.

Note that curiously in Poland people have not become fatter in 1970s - it started to happen later.

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite.

Well, why they have gained weight? Maybe restoring health weight is extremely hard, but you get there by overeating.

There has been a change in the natural environment.

not exactly natural one, but I agree (but it almost certainly was not lithium pushed by SM)

More comments

For certain people who lose weight, the body reacts by increasing lethargy and appetite.

At the levels of cutting they're doing to become a television star (in that article), absolutely. For most people, you can get pretty deep into a cut before you start feeling physical/mental effects. They do come as you continue to cut; as the saying goes, "...cut until you hate your life." These things can be expected; they should be expected; thus, you can plan for them if you're properly educated on the reality of things (i.e., CICO works) and on how to make an appropriate plan.

What absolutely doesn't work is just lying to people and saying that it just doesn't work because it's hard. Of course people are going to give up when everyone is lying to them and saying that it doesn't work. Of course people are going to not remain at maintenance after a cut when everyone is lying to them and telling them that it just magically comes back after a cut, no matter what you do. Of course people aren't even going to try when everyone is lying to them and telling them that you have to constantly feel like shit to make any progress ever.

I've told the story here before, but I'll say it again. My wife was someone who heard all those lies all her life. She believed them, and of course, wouldn't have been successful if she had just tried on her own. When she had tried in the past, it was always some fad diet about how you need to cleanse this or remove that chemical. I got her to be at least willing to try, and armed her with the ability to actually plan. Even then, after she saw it slowly working for months, she would still be like, "MAYBE IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE! MAYBE [insert some silly fool other idea here] INSTEAD!" And if I hadn't been there every time to essentially say, "Shut up. Keep doing it. You'll see in a week or two that it's still working," then she absolutely would have failed, specifically because people have been lying to her for her entire life.

So if you want an explanation for what's changed, there's at least two things. 1) The absolutely insane abundance of extremely high-calorie, low satiety foods and just calories in general, and 2) We started just lying to people over and over and over again. We shouldn't be surprised when people start believing the lie.

I mean, lots of things could be the cause. But I'd say the lowest of hanging fruit is the fact that everything has way too much sugar.

Like, I just finished a killer workout. I went to make myself a post workout snack, protein, banana, got out some bread, Pepperidge Farm 15 Grain Whole Wheat, and the third ingredient is sugar. It has 4 grams of added sugar per serving. A fun size Snickers has 8g of added sugar.

You know... maybe I should start baking my own bread from week to week.

When I bake bread I put 7g (one teaspoon) of sugar in ~400ml of water with 600g of flour.

That Pepperidge loaf seems to be 624g, which at the same 1:0.66 ratio would make it roughly 380g flour, 250ml water, of which some part is 48g of sugar.

7/600 = 0.01g sugar per g flour
48/380 = 0.12g sugar per g flour

So roughly 10x as much sugar.

For comparison a can of Coke has 35g of sugar in 330ml. They're making bread with water that is more sugary than Coke.

Everything is sweeter in the US - that's true. But it's not the HFCS, it's just that there's more sugar (including hfcs) in everything, so people get more food energy.

Mind you, you can buy decent bread in the US. Not sure about Walmart, but when I visited New England the local supermarket chain's bakery was producing fairly decent ciabatta bread. I think it was called 'Market Basket'?)

IIRC Mexicans bake bread too. Also 'German bakeries' maybe ?

It does seem obvious, but sugar consumption hasn't grown in the last decade while obesity continues to rise. I'll concede that it could be a delayed effect from childhood consumption.

You know that flour has just as many calories as sugar, gram per gram, right?

In fact I’m pretty sure refined flour has a higher glycaemic index than sucrose, owing to the fructose part of sucrose being more difficult to metabolise by humans.

That said putting extra sugar in surely doesn’t help

Also, it's not for flavor that most bread recipes (except ones that use chemical leavening) call for added sugar. Yeast cannot thrive on flour alone.

General populace just can't beat hyperstimulus

You could teach them to not buy that shit. Just ignore it. Never buy any of it. I used to buy junk food but I stopped because I'd sometimes eat too much of it and then feel bad.

Self control is a perfectly good solution to fatness. It won't solve the obesity epidemic because people refuse to apply it, not because it doesn't work

Doc note I dissent, a fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

And why do they refuse? Do you think that people want to be fat and unhealthy? They can't apply it like how average person can't just "learn to code" despite the existence of freely available courses and free time.

average person can't just "learn to code" despite the existence of freely available courses and free time.

The average person doesn't understand that he needs to know how to program, and that if he is a white collar worker, there is a very real chance that his boss might say "You have two weeks to complete this coding assignment. You should know how to do this"...and if he doesn't, he may well get fired or at least start circling the drain.

If you're at all interested in research? You learned to code in high school, maybe even middle school. Same for if you were at all interested in any kind of white-collar career.

Dieting isn't fun so they choose the easy option. It's not impossible for them to eat less. If you put a gun to their head they'd do it but they just don't want it bad enough to go through the discomfort

Do you think that people want to be fat and unhealthy?

They prefer being fat and unhealthy to eschewing the pleasures of eating whatever the fuck they want.

What about Japan? Obesity rate there is lower than Ethiopia!

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-rates-by-country

I keep hearing people I presume to be Americans bemoaning obesity like it's an otherwise incurable curse that needs a technical fix. It really isn't impossible to have a healthy country if you have a healthy diet. Japan is fairly wealthy. Japan has access to American-style food, they just have their own cuisine which is healthier than the stuff we eat in the West. And I've never heard complaints that Japanese food is boring and unpleasant to eat. Hyperstimulus is just a description of problems localized to Western diet. And it is also possible to be healthy with a Western diet, if people put in a little effort cooking at home and buying food with proper ingredients that our ancestors would recognize. Cooking is not an advanced skill like programming, every household could do it a century ago.

HFCS-enriched chemical food is a choice. Like with its drugs problem, the US chooses to be fat and sick. It is possible for rich countries to be healthy and thin. It is possible for countries to build HSR. There are examples of it happening all around us.

In my opinion what matters is the trend not current value, Japan's obesity rate only risen through out the last decades, like in almost any other country on Earth. Problem isn't limited to westerners, much poorer and culturally distinct Middle East has rates similar to European ones. Western hyperstimulus is no longer western it is global.

BMI of Japanese men is 137. Highest out of 190 countries, in 53 states are the men thinner. BMI of Japanese women is 183., women of 7 states (Vietnam, Burundi, Madagascar, Bangladesh, East Timor, Ethiopia, Eritrea) are less chubby.

If one looks at Japanese BMI (x axis is time, left graph is of men (男), right of women (女), click the radio button in the top right to isolate an age group) throughout the latter half of 20th century, separated by age and sex, some things stand out.

Men of Japan keep getting fatter, be they 20 or 60. Only 17 year old boys buck the trend. Nothing to talk about here.

The BMI of members of the gentler gender of Japan meanwhile, doesn't such a uniform trend by age group. 20 and 30 year old Japanese women are thinner today then when the pipe smoking general led the Land of the Rising Sun(!), still, they are fatter than they were 1995 or 2005. 40 year olds have slightly higher BMI, but it peaked in 1970. The BMI of 50 year olds peaked in 1980, of 60 yo's in 1995, and of 70 yo's in 2000.

The stereotype does checkout.

Japanese food is boring and unpleasant to eat. Most of it, most of the time anyway. Easily the worst culinary experience of any country I've visited. I'm just not into raw fish or weird fish parts. For vegetarians it's even worse. Westernised sushi is great but is only superficially similar to "real" sushi.

I don't think this explains why Japan is thin; that would be the society wide state-sponsored social shaming. Men with a waistline over 33.5" face penalties & are forced into counselling sessions. Companies with too many fat employees can be fined. This is not height or race adjusted. I know a tall white man living in Japan who would be considered exceptionally fit by Western standards, struggling to keep his waistline down to that level. He'll likely need to emigrate next year.

Westernised sushi is great but is only superficially similar to "real" sushi.

Not to me. There is nothing more disgusting than shoving cream cheese next to cold rice and raw salmon. OTOH, remove that cream cheese and paint a small amount of actually fermented soy onto the salmon, and you have a real treat.

Still, Japan has lots of stuff that should theoretically make you fat. Tempura, ramen/soba/udon, takoyaki, mochi, plenty of alcoholic beverages like beer, whiskey, sake, etc.

There is nothing more disgusting than shoving cream cheese next to cold rice and raw salmon.

I think that fad started in Japan. "Japan has finally discovered cheese" as my friend put it 3 or 4 years ago. Possibly starting with a cheese flavoured Kitkat, of all things, and then they tried it in everything.

Personally I much prefer westernized smoked salmon and avocado nori roll, than authentic raw salmon nigiri. I was a big fan of westernized Japanese food, so was looking forward to trying the "real thing" and came away disappointed. (As opposed to Thailand, which exceeded my expectations). But yes this is all tangential to the point, there's surely enough unhealthy food in Japan that you could get fat if you wanted to.

There's no mystery to how Japan stays thin. Draconian government enforcement. Being fat in Japan is literally illegal. That's all there is to it. I... don't think that would work in the west (and sincerely hopes noone tries!).

I suppose you can register my diametrically opposite reaction to Japanese food vs faux Japanese food. California rolls are downright nauseating and an abomination, while — staying entirely away from raw fish and weird fish parts and only confining myself to seafood — eel kabayaki; stewed/grilled/steamed/pickled mackerel/amberjack/sea bream/other fish species; seafood tempura; oshizushi with cooked fish…all of those sans oshizushi are quite mainstream even in the west, and most if not all should suit a western palate.

I’d also add that vegetarian food in Japan and China has been enormously better than vegetarian food I have had in the west. A dinner I had at a Buddhist abbot’s house in Kyushu was easily the best vegetarian food I’d had in my life (adding that I’ve been to Buddhist gatherings and houses and temples exactly twice in my life, and I didn’t eat that other time).

Salmon wasn’t even used as a raw fish originally (or anything more than seafood filler; it is not traditionally popular in Japan), only appearing in Japan in the 90s. To this day I still think it is a rather inferior sashimi/sushi fish. A good tuna with a well-made nikiri would have been a better experience.

There are other reasons other than food and Japan fining the shit out of fat people (which, in fact, Japan does not do on a personal basis) for the Japanese staying thin, though. Walking from one place to another is quite normalized, for one.

(and sincerely hopes noone tries!).

Why?

Personally I much prefer westernized smoked salmon and avocado nori roll,

Eww. Although you and my wife would agree.

I just want salted fish with umami added when I want sushi. If I want cheese, I'll do pasta TYVM.

Why?

Generically, because of the importance of personal liberty etc. Insert standard libertarian talking points here.

On a more personal level, I'm fat and not particularly bothered about it. The pleasure I derive from eating chocolate far outweighs my weight. I don't think it's something I can change - I can eat much worse than I do now and not gain any more weight, or I can try to starve myself and be hungry and grumpy until my willpower runs out and I walk to a 24 hour convenience store in the middle of the night to buy chocolate, and not lose any weight. Having a government agent step in to keep me perpetually hungry and grumpy sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Well I stand corrected about never hearing complaints about Japanese food. On my visit to Japan, the food tasted fine. And if it isn't the food but the shaming, then fat shaming does work then.

Companies with too many fat employees can be fined.

Sounds good, or at least better than our approach of 'companies with too many white employees can be fined'. I recall a case of black NYC teachers getting a big payout because they failed a test that too many whites passed.

This kind of top down enforcement is rarely desirable, though. I know plenty of guys at work who could probably be categorised as overweight based on crude heuristics like waist size or BMI. They're the same guys that I want with me when it's time to load the truck.

Sure. That's probably true; however, visceral fat is still unhealthy. Although a few extra pounds is mostly OK. Swole people also know who they are.

Maybe they do, but does the government know? Or care, since there's some evidence that carrying a lot of muscle is also harmful to longevity?

The Japanese eat plenty of fast food or processed food on the go. I doubt it possesses any quality that ramen in America lacks.

People in thin places like Japan, Ethiopia, or the 1970s don't need to exercise self-control to stay thin. They just stay thin naturally.

On the other hand, we have a word for people who need to constantly employ self-control to try to lose weight. We call them fat people.

The solution is not for people to employ heroic amounts of self control. Instead the solution is for the natural environment to be reshaped such that self-control is not necessary. Sadly, there are no practical suggestions for how to do this on a large scale. We're not going to turn the U.S. into Japan. Also, we don't truly understand the root causes of the obesity epidemic.

I also think the suggestions for people to "just eat less" are equally bad. If you tell someone to do something 1000 times and they never do it, the advice isn't bad necessarily, but its certainly not effective.

I don't have any great suggestions for the interventions that will work. I just know that the ones which have been repeated ad nauseum for the last 30 years definitely don't work. It's time to try something different.

Semalglutide and its successors seem the most likely to actually make a difference.

Sadly, there are no practical suggestions for how to do this on a large scale.

For start, make walking in USA towns and cities possible and stop designing any new urban spaces primarily for cars.

When I see a comment like this, my instinct is to ask "How?" We just traded a personal-level problem for a politics-level solution, which means it will happen approximately never. Not only is the morass of US politics highly illogical, it is supported by a whole ecosystem of bad decisions and incentives which work against change, from zoning laws which benefit existing suburban homeowners to subsidized housing requirements which force new developments to be low-status places to live.

I guess the personal solution is to just buy a home for yourself in a nice urban space. Not only can you become part of a community which walks everywhere, but your neighbors will share your values (Hopefully), and if land values go up, other landlords will be motivated to make more places like your urban space.

People in thin places like Japan, Ethiopia, or the 1970s don't need to exercise self-control to stay thin. They just stay thin naturally.

People in Ethiopia don't need self control because they have external control; they can't get enough food. I don't know that people in Japan don't exercise self-control.

On the other hand, we have a word for people who need to constantly employ self-control to try to lose weight. We call them fat people

Those who employ self-control to not gain weight we call "people of normal weight".

The solution is not for people to employ heroic amounts of self control.

It doesn't take "heroic amounts". Mostly it means strict attention to avoiding self-delusion, which is perhaps one place where fat-shaming helps. If every time a fat person complained they weren't eating much but still gaining weight, they were told that maybe they should put down the snack they're eating while they're complaining, it might have an effect. But that's considered rude.

Hmm.

  1. Make things like McDonald's, junk food, etc. low-status. Like smoking cigarettes.

  2. Stop subsidizing HFCS and other junkfood. Start subsidizing healthier options.

  3. A bit harsher - different tax rates, potentially different jail sentences and traffic fines, etc for heavy people.

  4. Morbidly obese people also are expected to be celibate: it's considered disgusting for them to present themselves as anything other than more or less asexual, and it's transgressive and considered in extremely poor taste for them to be in relationships.

  5. Intensive shaming. Weight loss of the Hock. If you're morbidly obese you are expected to train and have yourself dumped into the Alaskan wilderness in late winter with no rescue beacon. If you don't make it out, you're too fat to be a good citizen; if you survive, you're presumably leaner and fitter after having spent a couple weeks in absolutely frigid conditions hauling your gear through the Alaskan wilderness. If you're still big? You get dumped again and again 'till you're either fit or dead. This is...strictly voluntary, but you're seen as cowardly and dishonorable for not doing it.

Mostly it means strict attention to avoiding self-delusion, which is perhaps one place where fat-shaming helps. If every time a fat person complained they weren't eating much but still gaining weight, they were told that maybe they should put down the snack they're eating while they're complaining, it might have an effect.

It might be mostly an American phenomenon. All fat people I know(and there are many of them with 20% obesity rate and majority of population overweight) are honest about their eating habits and often make related self-deprecating jokes. And of course they relentlessly try many different things to lose weight from brand new diets, to calorie counting, to all kinds of exercising and it doesn't help because they can't maintain them.

What if the US just tried harder? In wartime, if fighting hasn't worked, then surrender, flight or negotiation are alternative options. But you can also fight harder to achieve victory.

I refuse to accept that the US has made a serious effort to fight obesity. European and American versions of food are wildly different in their ingredients, even the unhealthy stuff is markedly more full of weird chemicals:https://foodbabe.com/food-in-america-compared-to-the-u-k-why-is-it-so-different/

I know that everything is technically a chemical but there should not be petroleum products in food, not even as preservatives. That's not something we were supposed to consume. Reduce the processed chemical slop, return to food that comes from fields, seas and pasture.

We're not going to turn the U.S. into Japan.

Well, when Japan faced serious problems with their society, they tried consciously and intensively to turn itself into a blend of the UK, Germany and America. They copied the strengths of other nations and became stronger for it, while the rest of Asia was left behind. But they could've said, 'oh we're not going to turn Japan into Germany', done nothing and gotten colonized. Learning from other countries and copying what they do well is a useful and beneficial tactic. Refusing to learn is not a recipe for success.

Good points as long as "try harder" isn't just try the same stuff that's failed over and over again but the Max Power way.

I said I didn't have any ideas, but interventions targeted at youth seem like they have the greatest chance of success. People who are fat at age 18 tend to be fat for life. We could have more P.E. classes and actually flunk the nerds and fat kids who fail to meet standards instead of giving everyone who shows up an A.

If we're allowed to consider pharmaceutical inventions, then Metformin and Semalglutide should be free.

I think it would be good to teach young people how to cook for themselves. It's a basic, important skill. Economical too.

I mean, if Semaglutide works then great. It just seems like a really inelegant solution. What are the other consequences of eating highly processed food? Is processed food or additives making people mentally ill? Reducing sperm counts? There are other modern plagues aside from obesity. Even examining pictures of our grandfathers reveals significant differences in phenotype. There are faces that you just don't see anymore.

I think a big chunk of this multifaceted problem stems from things that people ingest, whether that's hormones, food additives, drugs or microplastics. Better to change diets than to introduce new sources of complexities via gastric bypass or drugs. Once we have a complete understanding of the body and biology generally, then we should be more aggressive. Given that our understanding is limited, we should try to reduce complexity of inputs (or use tried and tested inputs), reduce unnecessary medical interventions. Healthcare already gobbles up too much of our wealth as it is, with limited returns on quality of life.

As someone who doesn’t cook, it’s because it takes ages to get a worse-tasting product than what I can buy, it’s messy and I have to clean up afterwards. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time. It would be an ask even if I had a big kitchen and a short commute but otherwise it’s just not on.

Perhaps I’m overextending but I think that before 1950 cooking was done by housewives, employers or landladies. After the 80s it was mostly takeaways and microwaveable meals. The era when a majority of employed people cooked for themselves was almost infinitesimally short.

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I think it would be good to teach young people how to cook for themselves. It's a basic, important skill. Economical too.

I thought that's what home ec classes were supposed to cover.

https://foodbabe.com/food-in-america-compared-to-the-u-k-why-is-it-so-different/

It would have been nice if she had compared calories as well as ingredients. I tried looking up mcdonalds fries in the US vs UK and they give calories but not serving size on their website. The US is fatter than the UK but the UK is still pretty fat, something like a 30% obesity rate, so if weird ingredients are the cause of obesity I would expect the UK to be doing better than they are.

I like the idea of fighting harder against obesity, I really do think it's one of our biggest problems. But I don't think the government is likely to fight very well. With coronavirus we got a lot of draconian regulations that caused a lot of suffering but failed to do much if anything to save lives. This is the same government that made a food pyramid telling everyone to eat a ton of carbs and mostly avoid protein.

Except, again they have the same food environment we do. They have restaurants, including fast food. They have convenience stores full of processed junk, just like we do. The difference between them and us is not the food, it’s food culture. They have much stronger taboos against overeating and being fat. People there have no problem shaming people for eating more than they should, they have no problem pointing out when a close friend or relative gains weight.

So, in your opinion, the change in obesity in the US and Europe since the 1970s has been due to different shaming norms?

Well, changes in food culture in general, but shaming is a part of that. People used to eat much smaller portions, and they’d discourage snacking between meals “don’t spoil your dinner” was a normal admonishment in the 1970s and 1980s. Kids weren’t allowed to drink soda very often. My family only really had desserts around when we had visitors of some sort. And kids were encouraged to be active and play outdoors and so on. Parents did get concerned when their kids got fat (keep in mind, this was 1980s fat, not obese). It wasn’t explicitly shaming as in “drop the burger fatty” yelled at strangers, but people did see it as weird when someone was having huge servings of something.

That, and the American anti-smoking campaign

Except, again they have the same food environment we do.

Not really. I'll skip HFCS, which is both over-discussed and probably not a key driver of the blubber gap, and point out that America is the only country where bread is routinely sweetened. Notoriously among VAT geeks, Subway is legally candy in Ireland because there is so much added sugar in the bread.

Seriously, the amount of added sugar in mass-market bread in the most European countries (I am only directly familiar with the UK, Ireland and France) is zero. If you want sweet bread, you spread honey on it.

In my experience, all the diets which actually work for large numbers of people involve severely restricting refined sugar (including fruit juice) and somewhat restricting sugar in whole fruit. That is a lot harder if staples like bread have hidden sugar in.

TheMotte seems hard hereditarian when talking about intelligence and social status but, somehow, it becomes a blank statist, just lift bro, "cultural factors" social scientist when it comes to obesity, dating and physical appearance.

Heredity provides a ceiling on intelligence. And on musculature (at least without serious drugs) -- some people can indeed lift and not build much muscle. I haven't seen anyone say "cultural factors" about physical appearance beyond that which is (obviously) affected by diet and exercise; nobody's claiming height or nose shape is cultural. Except in some very unusual cases, the floor heredity puts on healthy weight is well below what people call "fat". Does heredity affect propensity to gain weight? You bet. But it doesn't make you fat.

TheMotte seems hard hereditarian when talking about intelligence and social status but, somehow, it becomes a blank statist, just lift bro, "cultural factors" social scientist when it comes to obesity

American weights have blown up in the last century. So we can't blame DNA on this one.

It is quite striking, isn't it! The same person here will literally attribute intelligence and personality, assimilation, etc almost entirely to genetics, then turn around and say attractiveness and weight is a character flaw. It's fascinating.

Yes, it is quite striking that a (probably largely) wrong claim is pointed out as wrong and a (probably largely) correct claim is pointed out as correct. And people around here can simultaneously believe that one claim is true but an unrelated claim is false.

There have been IQ heritability studies. It's a lot more than 50% heritable. Understanding that's gated by childhood nutrition, parasite load, etc; people around here throwing around IQ heritability assertions are largely correct.

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One can be born with ugly features, or a short adult height or otherwise unpleasing proportions. Weight isn't like that. No amount of genetics will make you 300 pounds without putting the requisite calories into your system.

Personality, on the other hand, whether genetic or not is one of the most immutable things there is. The so-called personality disorders are pretty much intractable. About the only thing that changes personality is brain damage and the various extreme measures called "brainwashing" (usually involving drugs, torture, or both)

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I don't buy the high-fructose corn syrup hate. HFCS is 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Table sugar is sucrose, which is hydrolyzed in the gut to 50% fructose and 50% glucose. The metabolic pathways are almost identical. There's no reason to treat HFCS differently from any other cheap sweet food.

Does HFCS taste purely sweet or do the extra oligomers present impart a different taste? I swear US Coca Cola tastes like ass, but (most of) the rest of the world is fine; the only difference I know between the two is that the US coke definitely uses HFCS while I think it’s more common for…pure sucrose? to be used outside of the US.

Also putting sugar or HFCS in everything is a problem because everything tastes too sweet

If you put sugar in nearly everything, surely you would expect people to get fatter?

Sure but HFCS specifically gets a lot of hate. If they replace HFCS with regular sugar then we're back where we started.

The entire concept of "shaming" seems like a relatively new concept to me, in much the same way that "gendering" is a relatively new concept. It used to be understood that some things (like being fat) were just inherently shameful by nature, irrespective of whether anyone was engaged in the act of "shaming." Now the idea is that things only become shameful as a result of the act of shaming, i.e. of being assigned shame by someone. I feel like a similar transformation took place around the concept of gender, from being a description of a state of affairs to being the result of "gendering," i.e. external assignment or perception of gender.

None of this is denying that shame and gender are socially constructed. But there's a big, unacknowledged leap from "X is a social construct" to "X is only real if individual people choose to acknowledge it." If I say my friend John is wealthy because he has $10 million in the bank, I'm describing a social construct. Money is a social construct, and the concept of what qualifies as "wealthy" is a social construct. But it doesn't follow that John ceases to be wealthy if I stop treating him as though he is wealthy. Even I refuse to acknowledge John's wealth, he still has $10 million of purchasing power. Even if everyone who John knows pretends like he's broke, he's still not broke.

It used to be understood that some things (like being fat) were just inherently shameful by nature, irrespective of whether anyone was engaged in the act of "shaming." Now the idea is that things only become shameful as a result of the act of shaming, i.e. of being assigned shame by someone.

Or: once the shaming architecture was created it required little active buy-in or serious positive action from any individual. If everyone thinks Stacy is a slut then Stacy is just a slut and no one who believes or even says it stands out that much.

However, when progressives start to problematize or taboo shaming, it suddenly requires active reinforcement. Then John stands out when he says Stacy is a slut after they got the talk on "slut-shaming" and a bunch of people were cowed into submission.

Look at gender: progressives love to raise practical issues with enforcing gendered bathrooms ("will you check genitals?") as if we haven't had a workable honor system up until they ruined it. Now, after some people have been convinced it's their human right to use the wrong bathroom, we need to enforce gender and we're gonna have uncomfortable things like false positives and some dude - or more likely a Karen - being a gatekeeping asshole.

I think this and other things like it point to why we’ve lost the good parts of shame — that we’ve lost any notion of an objective standard of good. You cannot call something shameful and bad unless the society at large has an idea about that thing being bad. I cannot fat-shame unless the whole of society thinks that being fat is bad and bad enough to call people on. If I or, for that matter you, don’t see fatness as bad, there’s no way to make you feel bad about being fat. It’s then down to personal taste, and loses power as a judgement. Or if I attempt to shame you for expressing positive views of HBD. If you think it’s the right opinion to hold, shaming doesn’t work.

At the same time though, we have lost much of the utility of shame. Shame, in its traditional role, is to engender manners and create a very legible and trainable way for people to interact with each other.

We have completely different view of the situation, shame is routinely used now to the extent that it was probably not used for decades before - to enforce progressive values. The progressives developed shame into an art, they deployed the heavy philosophical weapons and they even have special name for it - problematization which is very much also part of the Critical tradition (as in Critical Theory). Look at something or somebody and try to find out what is wrong with them. Shame them until you take control of it.

James Lindsey described this tactics as a three-pronged ad hominem attack:

  1. Attack on your intellectual legitimacy: Are you an expert on the topic? Did you read all the relevant books? What is your H index, do you have PHD or do you use authoritative sources such as New York Times?

  2. Attack on your emotional legitimacy: Who hurt you that you are saying this? Are you feeling well today, you do not seem like yourself, It is okay to accept that you are depressed, no shame in that.

  3. Attack on your moral legitimacy: You know that only fascists say what are you saying? Why did you like a tweet from known transphobe?

In short, people are constantly pressured that they are either stupid, crazy or evil if they do not conform - sometimes all three things at once. We are living in one of the most stifling times in history of humanity. Just today there is a news that one Noah Gragson was suspended from NASCAR for liking a twitter meme making joke of George Floyd. Liking a tweet in your home on your private time possibly while drunk is fireable offense now. Talk about losing the utility of shaming. Utility of shaming is all there on the display stronger than ever, it shows its power and utility of creating illusion of conformity all around us.

It has gone out of fashion to shame people into talking or acting a certain way

It hasn't. Cancel culture is the clear evolution of this impulse. We've simply graduated from mere shaming to total life destruction as the price of transgression against enforced norms.

How can we grapple with the two edges of shame, and find a way to have productive social discourse without burying people under piles of negative emotions?

There seems to be a clear dividing line between your examples; we can shame people for things they choose to do but not for things they didn't choose.

Does it start with changing internet culture, and following the cancellation warrior's plan of making online anonymity a thing of the past?

Absolutely fucking not. This just ensures every conflict goes to whoever has the socially acceptable position and therefore bigger mob, not the best arguments. Without anonymity, one side still gets to abuse and belittle people; the "socially acceptable" side.

It hasn't. Cancel culture is the clear evolution of this impulse. We've simply graduated from mere shaming to total life destruction as the price of transgression against enforced norms.

This is also a possible explanation. We've gone from shaming bad behavior to shaming good behavior.

It hasn't. Cancel culture is the clear evolution of this impulse. We've simply graduated from mere shaming to total life destruction as the price of transgression against enforced norms.

Uh, old school shame societies could and did destroy lives over things they considered shameful.

Now many of these things had more natural negative consequences than say, privately using a racial slur. But when progressives complain about lives being ruined over taboo violations in the past, most of the time the life ruining came from social consequences and not from natural consequences. Figures canceled for being gay in the 80’s died of aids at high rates, but not 100%. The only thing that’s really changed is what’s taboo.


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