site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28963 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom New Old Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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.

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.

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.

deleted

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.

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.

deleted

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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..."

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.

[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.

I also, on principal and because I have many non-white friends and family members, abhor white nationalism and antisemitism

A surprisingly large (>25%) number of white nationalists and antisemites have significant numbers of jewish and nonwhite friends. Many possible things to conclude from it.

I also, on principal and because I have many non-white friends and family members, abhor white nationalism and antisemitism.

This is like saying you abhor Zionism because you have non-Jewish friends. You have non-white friends, so you don't think white people should retain any ethnic identity or advocate for it in any way? How does that make sense? Do you deny any other ethnic group its ability to advocate for its own interests because you have friends outside that ethnic group? I have non-Chinese friends so I abhor Chinese nationalism I guess... Would that make sense to you, or does this sort of logic only apply for white people?

China has nothing to do with anything, although they’re certainly welcome to keep their society mono ethnicly Han if they want to. On the other hand keeping the US majority anglo white is not going to happen with measures short of genocide or other mass population movement. I’m not sure how nonwhites are less American than whites, as you’re implying- we’ve had lots of black people and natives here since the beginning and you can decry that fact but denying their American-ness makes no sense. Likewise chinamen are not recent arrivals and often predate many of the white Americans.

Look, I’m a Cajun. I’m part of an actual ethnic group that’s defined in part by being white or at least white-ish. ‘Whites aren’t allowed to have ethnic identity’ is just false to me, they’re not allowed to have ethnic identity generically as whites. German American or Irish American heritage or whatever is not controversial. Southern heritage is, but that’s individual prejudice. Yes there are stupid things being done that harm whites on the whole, but it’s a suspicious gerrymander to define white Americans as an ethnic group excluding non-whites.

On the other hand keeping the US majority anglo white is not going to happen with measures short of genocide or other mass population movement.

No it's not going to happen, a fact which is known to all "White Nationalists." Jews don't expect to attain a majority, but for some reason that doesn't stop them from organizing on tribal lines, in fact their minority status makes their agitation for Jewish interests all the more important in their mind. So this statement, while true, does absolutely nothing to rebut the importance of a white identitarianism in the face of the reality of demographic change, and this fact underscores the importance for why it's necessary to advocate for it given the reality we live in today. Whites becoming a minority only makes the danger of prevailing anti-white culture and propaganda more acute.

‘Whites aren’t allowed to have ethnic identity’ is just false to me, they’re not allowed to have ethnic identity generically as whites.

Ok, so you concede the point... Notice that there is a "white identity" when it is a subject of criticism and critique of everyone else, but anybody who is put under that umbrella by Progressives cannot actually advocate for the ethnic identity that is central to their critique of prevailing culture? It doesn't make any sense.

Many white Americans are not "German American", they are a mix of different European ethnicities, which is why a "white" ethnic identity is a coherent ethnic category. It's good enough in every sense: in census data, crime statistics, leftist cultural critiques and CRT, but when it comes to advocacy in the same terms as every single other ethnic identity then all of a sudden it's an invalid category. That's incoherent, it's hostile.

I've always found the claim against self-identification as White in the face of African American identity rather farcical. Because whites didn't trace their ancestry and maintain distinct European cultural traditions they can't identify as White? But it's ok for African Americans because many were descended from slavery, can't trace their ancestry at all, so they're allowed to create an identity? You're not allowed to identify as Chinese unless you specifically can trace your Han lineage back to a particular province?

It's just clear anti-White advocacy, I suspect based on a fear of the specter of Nazism and White ethno-nationalism. Divide and conquer with 30+ white identities who are never allowed to find common interest. But attacking them all as 'White' is fine and dandy of course.

It’s ok for African Americans because they’re an ethnic group. White Americans are not- white southerners and WASPs and midwestern Germans and Utah Mormons are, but you’ll notice those groups have not always gotten along and presented a United front.

Yes, the definition of ethnic group is somewhat arbitrary and you can draw a gerrymander to where white Americans to the exclusion of non-white passing individuals are an ethnic group, but it’s a suspicious gerrymander. You can argue that white southerners and wasps and Italian Americans and midwestern Germans and Utah Mormons and the like should cooperate against other ethnic groups, but I don’t trust no Yankee and the arguments for why I should pick Yankees over more culturally similar blacks need to be made instead of relying on white solidarity that doesn’t exist need to actually be made.

Like look, a lot of the distinguishing cultural markers for African Americans are stupid and destructive, but they do exist in a way that distinguishes African Americans as a whole from other Americans in a way that doesn’t for white Americans.

White Americans are not

This is just completely absurd. The very first Congress of the United States codified that naturalization of foreign-born citizens was restricted to "free whites of good character". It is unbelievable that you deny the existence of this ethnic group when one of the very first acts of the Congress of the United States was to explicitly restrict naturalization to white people.

Likewise, during slavery and segregation and ever since there has been a distinction between "Whites" and "colored" (or whatever term is being used at the time). In census data, the unit of distinction has always been "whites" and non-whites of different categories. Same goes for crime statistics tracked by the FBI. "White" is also treated as a coherent ethnic identity when it is subjected to criticism by Hollywood and academic institutions and affirmative action. There are many many cases where the existence of a "white" ethnic identity is accepted and taken for granted, it's only in the case of advocacy where people like you come out of the woodwork and deny that such a thing actually exists.

White Americans are not- white southerners and WASPs and midwestern Germans and Utah Mormons are, but you’ll notice those groups have not always gotten along and presented a United front.

You could just as easily say that Germans aren't a real ethnicity with this argument. "Brandenburgers and Rhinelanders and Badenese and Bavarians and Austrians are, but you'll notice these groups have not always gotten along and presented a united front."

Americans can be an ethnic group, but any normal measure by which Americans are an ethnic group would include lots of non-white people, most notably african americans(not black Americans as a whole, there's lots of nigerians and haitians and the like here). "White Americans" are not an ethnic group by any measure that isn't a gerrymander, they're a collection of ethnic groups, and a normal way to measure which lumps them all together would lump African Americans in with them unless it's just motivated by anti-black racism. One needn't be a particular fan of blacks, and I am not, to recognize that for consistency's sake, African Americans are heritage Americans, and significantly more heritage than many white groups that are a major presence(eg Italian Americans).

Which is ironic because they're more likely to resent America. Anecdotally speaking. I'd have to see numbers to know for certain.

any normal measure by which Americans are an ethnic group would include lots of non-white people

No, it wouldn't, because race is both a meaningful difference and historically where the line was drawn in American culture. Next you're going to tell me that Cape Coloreds and Afrikaners are the same ethnicity.

Like look, a lot of the distinguishing cultural markers for African Americans are stupid and destructive, but they do exist in a way that distinguishes African Americans as a whole from other Americans in a way that doesn’t for white Americans.

I'm not American, but I don't buy this at all. You talk about Gerrymandering, but there is clearly a 'just so' line drawn about what groups are allowed to assert a cultural identity and those that are not. Whites cannot, but Blacks can. For nebulous ill defined reasons that are seemingly asserted to prevent any defence against attacks against Whites as a whole.

If Whites aren't an ethnic group, why is the identification of and assault on them and their flaws largely uncontested in the overton window?

Part of that is surely that the vast majority of American blacks belong to a single ethnic group- African Americans- whereas there is no similarly dominant group for white Americans. And almost all "black cultural" celebrations are really just African American culture, which is far more similar to other American groups than to, eg, Nigerian culture, to the extent that American English uses "he's black" to mean "he's a member of the African American ethnic group" and would say "he's African/from Africa" to refer to a Nigerian as opposed to "he's black".

I agree that anti-white racism exists, but I don't think you really grasp how fringey the sorts of pan-Africanist ideas that would be used to back up "blacks can assert a cultural identity and whites cannot" are. American whites are a collection of different ethnic groups, some of them larger and some of them smaller, and most of them can assert a cultural identity. It's deplorable that southern whites aren't allowed to be proud of their heritage, but it's not really something that applies to, say, midwestern Germans.

I’m not sure how nonwhites are less American than whites, as you’re implying- we’ve had lots of black people and natives here since the beginning and you can decry that fact but denying their American-ness makes no sense.

This is a sleight of hand. "Black people who have lived here since the 17th century are American, so that means that whatever foreigner showed up 5 years ago is American too!" Despite the fact that there were 2% Mexicans and 0.1% Chinese living in America in 1870 or whatever, the large majority of the non-white population has only been present since after 1965 and can be easily distinguished from the pre-1965 inhabitants in terms of culture alone.

I kind of do abhor Chinese nationalism? And Russian nationalism, and so on, proportional to how much each feels like a threat. It’s worse when it’s explicitly racial rather than cultural, because America is the best in the world my own cultural values say that race-based nationalism is silly at best. Civic nationalism or patriotism is much more comfortable.

In America, there are a lot of white people, and a history of wignats organizing to do stuff I don’t like. Therefore, they get a few bumps up the threat ladder. Even though I don’t think they have any credible route to harming me or mine, they rate higher than most other racial nationalists. Ingroup, outgroup, fargroup, I suppose.

Working on down the line, Israeli nationalism doesn’t feel as threatening. I know you probably disagree with that.

I kind of do abhor Chinese nationalism?

No you don't, a Chinese person identifying Chinese and having a healthy level of ethnic self-regard and association with Chinese history and culture and advocating for the interests of the Chinese both in China and abroad, you would not find "abhorrent", do not lie. If China wanted to remain Chinese, which it does, you would find not find that abhorrent.

In America, there are a lot of white people, and a history of wignats organizing to do stuff I don’t like.

What a cop-out, as if "wignats" are the only population group that have identified as white and advocated for white people. The very people who founded America identified as such and had strong associations with their race, so White Nationalists also have a history of organizing stuff you do like, to a much more impactful degree in your daily life than Jewish nationalism without any shred of doubt.

Working on down the line, Israeli nationalism doesn’t feel as threatening. I know you probably disagree with that.

What's threatening is advocating for ethno-nationalism for your ingroup and individualism for your outgroup, which is what Jewish nationalism does. But because of the alchemy of Hollywood and our cultural institutions, this state of affairs doesn't feel threatening to you, and I believe you that it doesn't. But demographic change is proof that this state of affairs has real-world implications, it doesn't feel threatening because if you perceived it as threatening you would be ostracized from society.

Chinese person identifying Chinese

95% of people have no issue with this.

and having a healthy level of ethnic self-regard

What is a good level of ethnic self-regard? Why should a Chinese person support Chinese people more? If it's 'genetic self-interest for overall genetic health', why not pick the smart jew over the dumb chinese?

and association with Chinese history and culture

nobody has an issue with this.

and advocating for the interests of the Chinese

Vacuous claim, this entirely depends on which interest are being advocated for.

No you don't, a Chinese person identifying Chinese and having a healthy level of ethnic self-regard and association with Chinese history and culture and advocating for the interests of the Chinese both in China and abroad, you would not find "abhorrent", do not lie. If China wanted to remain Chinese, which it does, you would find not find that abhorrent.

If you doubt what someone says, or think you may be operating under different definitions, then ask questions, do not jump straight to calling them a liar.

If your best friends are all average Muslim Palestinians and they find out you're a hardcore Zionist, they're very unlikely to remain your friends. If your friends are Korean and they find out you're a hardcore Japanese nationalist who rues the end of the occupation of Korea, they're very unlikely to remain your friends. If your friends are African Americans and they find out you're a wn and regular Occidental Observer commenter, it's relatively unlikely they'll remain so. The left are correct when they say that the personal is political and vice versa. If you care about your friends (which, one imagines, most people do), it's hard to advocate things that you know might hurt them in a significant way.

I have friends who are Zionists (told me his parents live "near Jerusalem", lul), I can't imagine being such an asshole by telling them they can't support Jewish identity or a Jewish state because they are friends with me (a non-Jew). If any non-Jew went to a Jewish friend and said "you can't support Zionism or any concept of a Jewish state if you want to be my friend", that person would be universally denounced as anti-Semitic by any institutional power.

If any non-Jew went to a Jewish friend and said "you can't support Zionism or any concept of a Jewish state if you want to be my friend", that person would be universally denounced as anti-Semitic by any institutional power.

If Ilhan Omar wrote an op-ed saying that while she was "friends with many progressive, anti-apartheid Jews", she "could never be friends with someone, whatever their faith, who supported Zionism because it is a racist ideology" then she would face opprobrium from the ADL, the Israeli embassy and possibly mild condemnation from Biden's office, but the remarks would ultimately be in-line with others she has already made, and she would not face actual cancellation.

I have friends who are Zionists (told me his parents live "near Jerusalem", lul), I can't imagine being such an asshole by telling them they can't support Jewish identity or a Jewish state because they are friends with me (a non-Jew).

In your case, though, Zionists settling in East Jerusalem likely doesn't really affect you, your family or even anyone you care about personally. A Bhutanese person who has no intention of ever leaving their mountain kingdom is similarly uninvested in whether nativists come to power in America. If you were a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, or even had very close friends who were, you'd probably have a much stronger opinion on being friends with Zionists. Most commonly proposed hardline WN policies would directly affect the lives of non-whites in the US, ie. the friends of the previous commenter.

To say that Zionist influence doesn't affect me in the United States is summarily false, it absolutely does. The behavior of Jewish organizations like the ADL wouldn't make me demand that none of my friends identify as Jewish or advocate for Jewish people. I understand that inclination and respect it, I wouldn't think to do the same thing that you do to white people who identify as white and want to advocate for white people.

The fact I have non-Jewish friends does not mean I can't sympathize with someone who identifies as Jewish and has the best interests of Jewish people at heart. The problem is that feeling is not reciprocated by people like you. You want Jewish identity to be respected but then oppose anyone who wants to advocate for White people in the same way Jews advocate for themselves.

Rich Hollywood elites lined up to praise Parasite, German bourgeoisie was responsible for the success of Threepenny Opera. The people for whom they expressed disdain didn't seem to mind the animosity but instead sought and reveled in it.

Likewise ideologies which seeks to demonize the role ethnic Europeans as actors in history, could not have the prominence they enjoy, if they were only accepted by non-whites.

But you are correct: Palestinians, Koreans, African Americans are not like the two groups I mentioned, suggestions of alternate arrangements which would result in the diminishment of their status, cause them great offence.

This leads to: Why do some groups accept blame, mockery and disdain, but others do not?

Because those in the examples have a long cultural memory of victimhood in a way that white americans do not?

That seems kind of self serving. How well do you know American history? Most of America is not wealthy elite...

Who gets to decide who are the right kind of victims? You?

(hypothetical)

I enjoy going out to drink with hispanic and black friends. I enjoy intellectual discussions with jewish and arab friends. I benefit greatly from software and hardware developed by Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans in my country. White Nationalism means kicking them out or, at the very least, substantially reducing their social status (and therefore my social interactions with them and their ability to contribute to the economy). If otherwise ... it's not actually white nationalism or antisemitism, just White Affinity Groups or Pro-White Affirmative Action something. Why do I do this?

Hanania can't be "cancelled" in the traditional sense since being a public intellectual in the age of Substack makes that more difficult than it used to. He won't lose his job or be completely shut down or be forced to stop writing or anything like that.

However, a big part of Hanania's appeal was that he was published in more respectable outlets and signal-boosted by Boomer conservatives who have institutional power. The Boomer conservatives agreed with his message but are totally, utterly terrified of being considered "racist" so these attacks do meaningful damage. There's already some signs that Hanania's name has been severely damaged in respectable circles. A lot of the impact going forward will be hard to measure since it'll likely be outlets just silently refusing to interview him, but these are lost opportunities all the same.

Greg Johnson

I'm not familiar, so I clicked through, and kind of did a double-take at this quote:

“Blacks don’t find white civilization comfortable. It is like demanding they wear shoes that are two sizes too small when we impose our standards of punctuality and time preferences, demand that they follow our age-of-consent laws, or foist the bourgeois nuclear family upon them. These things don’t come naturally to Africans. White standards like walking on the sidewalk, not down the middle of the street, are oppressive to blacks. Such standards are imposed by the hated ‘white supremacy’ system. But if we don’t impose white standards upon them, we have chaos. We have great cities like Detroit transformed into wastelands.”

Prior to the last two concluding statements, this seems like a take that DEI people would largely nod along with (aside from the age-of-consent dig). Shades of the Ryan Long gag video.

Anyway, I agree, there isn't really any space for a true far-right in the United States. In your link, I think Johnson articulates the reason:

“We White Nationalists claim that the mixing of races inevitably causes hatred and conflict. So it is silly for us to pretend that we are immune to the effects of racial mixture. If White Nationalists who claim not to hate other races are honest, then they are living refutations of their own claim that multiracial societies breed hatred. ‘I am living proof that multiracial societies cause racial hatred.’” [emphasis mine]

Yes, exactly! This is largely self-refuting for most people. If you've actually spent time with people of other races, you probably wound up noticing that some of them are good, some of them are bad, and that group-level forced segregation isn't all that appealing of an ideological tenet. Of course, a few people will disagree, but I don't think they're going to do all that well as a political force. Despite the claims that all white Americans are racist, it sure seems like the stance held by most white Americans is that they don't hate other races.

Sure, on the level of individuals, group differences are hard to Notice. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or aren't meaningful, or that they don't have implications for the future. Individual trees do not a forest make, but forests are still real and you can get lost in them.

I know, I also wrote this post. I'm well aware of noticeable differences, have no interest in criminalizing or socially shaming noticing, and am against various sorts of DEI measures. My response is to Johnson's statement about white nationalism and hatred - I'm vigorously against racial hatred against people on both the group and individual level and similarly against state-enforced racial separatism.

Did north Ireland work? Is Syria a diverse paradise? Sri Lanka has terrorism from muslims who have lived there for 1300 years against "easter celebrators". Ukraine isn't having a good time and neither is every African country. The most peaceful places in the world are homogenous. The most dysfunctional and violent are multicultural. A giant Heathrow terminal of a society with intense security keeping people focused on shopping would be a bland world.

Diverse societies are low trust, fractured and easily divide. People naturally segregate. People's friends tend to be highly similar to themselves. Getting people to work together is hard and it works best with similar people.

Did north Ireland work?

Nope, which seems like as clear of a demonstration that the problem isn't race. No one that's not from the isles knows what the hell the difference between Ulster and the rest of the place is. Ireland is pretty ethnically homogenous, but because it has conflict, you define it as multicultural.

This is as close as we’re getting to a No True Scotsman, isn’t it?

The Troubles was a conflict between nationalists (almost all of whom were of Irish descent) and unionists (almost all of whom were of British descent).

If the ethnic differences between Irish and British people are too slight for this to qualify as a "real" ethnic conflict, nationalists were overwhelmingly Catholic, wanted their children to learn the Irish language, sent their children to Catholic schools, got their children playing GAA etc., while unionists were overwhelmingly Protestant, did not want their children learning the Irish language, sent their children to Protestant schools, got their children playing cricket etc. For centuries, Protestant employers would only hire Protestant staff, public housing was disproportionately allocated to Protestants, the police force was overwhelmingly Protestant etc..

Even to this day northern Ireland has the highest rate of hereditary disease in western Europe, made up as it is of two relatively small gene pools which hardly ever mix with one another.

The idea that this conflict wasn't ethno-nationalist in character is preposterous.

The idea that this conflict wasn't ethno-nationalist in character is preposterous.

There's no denying that it was, but there's a question as to whether this was because of an inherent incompatibility or because of particular political problems that shut off other avenues. The Normans were more ethnically different to the Irish than the Scots, they also came as invaders in the name of the English crown, nevertheless the ethnic difference was dissolved (to the point where no ethnic difference is recognized betweens the 'Fitz's and the 'O's).

An alternative history where the United Irishmen got their way would likely see as much division between Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics as exists between French Catholics and French Protestants.

Ireland is pretty ethnically homogenous

Wasn't there a whole thing with loads of (Lowland, Germanic extraction as opposed to Highland Gaelic extraction) Scots settling in the Ulster region that separates them from other Irish?

Well, it was less 'settling' and more 'being forced to move there due to the British crown of the time trying to get rid of two problems at once'. The history of the Scots-Irish is certainly... colorful.

Lowland Scots and Northern English weren't wholly Germanic, and in any case those who moved to Ireland often intermarried with large numbers of ethnic Irish (somewhat less so only in Armagh) in the first two centuries after settlement.

Protestant Irishman and Catholic Irishman can't get along, neither can two peoples who I would have honestly just labeled as Russian, so therefore I as an American descendant of Austrians and Hungarians must ally with Sicilians to keep Spaniards out. Just following the science.

Even referring to the former group as "Protestant Irishman" is a controversial statement. Most northern Irish Protestants consider themselves British (which they are, politically and legally).

Protestant Irishmen and Catholic Irishmen get along just fine in the Republic, and have done ever since independence. They got along just fine in 1798, when the United Irishmen were cross-confessional.

I was more addressing @functor 's point here.

You made me chuckle anyway. As a fellow American of Paleness, I agree that we have to work with the Sicilians, but I think we can also find potential allies in the notoriously conservative Vietnamese-Americans. On the flip side, I'm leery of the Minnesotan Nords, who are too egalitarian a lot.

I have plenty of complaints about the diversity-is-our-strength paradigm, but examples of strife seem thoroughly cherrypicked to me.

deleted

Put simply the aristocratic land-owning class of Ireland were Anglican, and the urbanised industrial area of Ulster was mostly Presbyterian. Catholics were harshly restricted by the Penal Laws but Presbyterians were deprived of certain rights also.

The United Irishmen, formed in Belfast by Presbyterian merchants in 1791, were inspired by American and French revolutionary ideals and saw the source of their evils in British rule and the Protestant (Anglican) Ascendency. They were happy to make common cause with Catholics, and Catholics were happy to do the same for obvious reasons. There were also some Anglicans involved who ended up making a majority of the actual military leaders during the coming rebellion.

Supported by a (late) French invasion the United Irishmen led a failed rebellion in 1798 to end British rule. Ironically it was the justification Britain needed to deprive Ireland of its parliament and form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which led to another abortive uprising in 1803.

I'll quote Wolfe Tone, one of the Leaders of the United Irishmen, because it's about a concise a statement of Irish nationalism as you'll get:

To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissentions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter—these were my means.

This was the first and I think the only time Catholics and Presbyterians worked together under the banner of republicanism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries you started seeing a lot more Anglican figures amongst Ireland's republican and nationalist movements.

In fairness I think ulster Protestants are their own ethnic group that also tends to be confessionally different from republic Irish Protestants.

Right, Northern Ireland's Protestants are a mix of mostly Scottish descended Presbyterian and a minority of English descended Anglicans who fled north during the War of Independence and Civil War.

Ireland's Protestants are mostly the Anglicans who stayed put during those wars.

You don’t even have to go back that far to find ethnic tensions between different white groups in the US, either. Actually the ethnic tensions between red and blue whites are one of the defining features of our politics today.

Even monethnic societies are assimilating rapidly into the global homogenization of culture, that's driven more by the ubiquity of the internet than by population movements. And many of the most dysfunctional and violent societies are relatively monoethnic, while other multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious societies like Singapore and Switzerland are some of the most prosperous nations on earth. And by 1870 European-Americans were already vastly more diverse than citizens of any Northern European country, and yet they built a much more prosperous and successful society in many ways (and are still substantially richer than their European cousins today).

You are correct, though, that for diverse societies to be successful in the long term they generally need to have a majority core population (Chinese and Germans, respectively), limitations on popular democracy and, over time, a formidable police state. For these (among other) reasons, hesitation around mass immigration to the US is justified.

Diverse but isolated.

People try to claim America as a melting pot without looking at the mechanics(Nevermind that the phrase itself referred to New York City). That's the part that always sticks at me when I look at my very local history and see the various ethnic settlements that developed.

Certainly, you have diverse ethnic settlements that look from a modern standpoint to be very close to one another... but when you stop and take a step back, consider the time period they developed and the lack of coherent infrastructure, and you realize that these self-same settlements were in the middle of fucking nowhere and would take a good number of days to reach the nearest town or transportation hub, nevermind the nearest city.

Diverse, but isolated. Now, there is no isolation; we are all in the pot together, and it's slowly starting to boil.

by 1870 European-Americans were already vastly more diverse than citizens of any Northern European country

Well they did get the most valuable real estate in the world. Fantastic farmland, minerals, navigable rivers and not a single strong enemy anywhere in their hemisphere. I'm fairly confident that the US was the biggest oil producer of all time, they started production way before Saudi Arabia and are number 1 producer today.

Was Switzerland really multicultural? There are French-speakers, German-speakers and Italian-speakers, yet these countries are all right next to each other. From a broad overview, they're European and from roughly the same part of Europe too. This is not really a core example of multiculturalism. By that argument Britain circa 1900 would be multicultural with Scots, English, Welsh and Irish. Yet it is not really considered diverse or multicultural.

Brazil was much more diverse than America (Portuguese, Germans, blacks and a significant number of natives) and did not fare so well. Diversity also enables race quotas which are toxic for meritocracy. They're a major part of life in Brazil, India and increasingly the US. Even the Mongol-run Yuan dynasty had race quotas since the Mongols and their allies weren't able to cut it in Chinese exams - a fact which was very frustrating to the Han majority and one of the causes of the Ming takeover.

Was Switzerland really multicultural? There are French-speakers, German-speakers and Italian-speakers, yet these countries are all right next to each other.

There was a big religious divide which led to some civil wars if that counts.

Did north Ireland work?

Northern Ireland's political problems are a massive confounder here. In Scotland, England and the Republic of Ireland the Irish (of which there are millions of descendants in Britain) and British live in peace. You could say that Northern Ireland's problems derive from diversity, but really there were wars being fought over the issue of British rule before the Protestants even settled in Ulster.

The most dysfunctional and violent are multicultural.

Northern Ireland's crime rate is about average for the UK and has been falling steadily since the military conflict ended.

In Scotland

With two highly similar groups, they still have a strong independence movement in Scotland. Even minute differences between groups can lead to centuries of problems. If these differences had been larger they would have been much worse. Belgium is still spit between french and Walloons 200 years later. Yugoslavia didn't work. Iraq hasn't been able to unite.

Trying to get completely different groups to work together is bound to fail.

Trying to get completely different groups to work together is bound to fail.

That may be true or it may not be, but Ulster seems like a bad example as for most of its history they didn't even try. In the recent decades where they have tried to cooperate, things have gotten a lot better.

It's also a tiny area which was inevitably swept up in larger currents. The conflict didn't rise up purely from within, whether it was the old IRA down south or the Jacobite threat they had a lot of external disturbances which caused divide.

I'm not fond of language like 'hatred' but by the same token I don't live near poor black people. But even then, groups like Volksfront, a former neo-nazi street gang from the US, that was born out of the ethnic strife between poor whites and poor blacks, did not describe themselves as hateful. But by the same token they probably did do 'hateful things' against black people that they perceived as having wronged them.

What I'm trying to get at is this: I can easily recognize visceral hatred in most self described anti-racist people when the topic of rent comes up where I'm from. But why is rent so high? The market is extremely crowded. Why is it crowded? Well... We imported a bunch of foreigners.

You 'hate' high rent, but you don't hate the people who caused it. That's kind of a dilemma of ones own making. If you forbid yourself from 'hating' the cause of your ills then you will simply have to suffer. That sort of self inflicted suffering might be noble and make you a good person according to some anti-racist humanist 'ingroup everyone' ethos. But it is on some level self destructive and stupid. And I think that finger wagging at the people who notice that is a very easy, but very short sighted thing to do.

I'm not saying 'hating' is a good thing. I can certainly see excessive ingroup and outgroup bias make people act stupid. But I'm starting to lean towards the idea that it might be a necessary precursor for self preservation. I mean, my entire life I have seen nothing but openness and kindness towards the foreigner, and at the same time what I would call genuine living standards have gone down because of it.

And my point would be that abstracting yourself away from the problem like that is a first step towards never solving it. Or, should I say, the first symptom of a person who doesn't have the gumption or the psychological fortitude necessary to solve it.

No matter how you slice it, Mauricio needs to go regardless of how nice of a guy he is and no matter how much he is a victim of circumstance. But when people can't bring themselves to even label Mauricio as a part of the problem then they will never actually solve it. Because the ultimate solution is to remove Mauricio from the country and make sure he can't come back.

Focusing on the policymakers is a psychological copout. It might be true to some extent that policy is a big part of creating the problem and an important part in ending it, but I don't think that's what's driving people towards it. I think that for most, 'disliking' Mauricio is a step too far for them.

Prior to the last two concluding statements, this seems like a take that DEI people would largely nod along with

The Smithsonian museum's poster about "white culture" was exactly this.

Weren’t they absolutely thrashed for that?

I take as a demonstration of echo chambers more than something “largely” acceptable.

They were mocked on the internet and issued an apology, but as best I know they paid no price for it. Not even a performative firing of a scapegoat.

They too plainly and in a much too accessible manner stated these norms are actually "white". But others state similar claims outside of the context of an easy to read poster. There's some woke subset of society that casually denounces positive social norms as "whiteness". Poor Smithsonian got unlucky in getting mocked over it.

They had to take it down, but I think 'absolutely thrashed' is rather strong. There were no riots over it, no weeks of non stop media coverage, nobody was turned into a pariah and made to self flagellate over it on national tv. It was only taken down because it said the quiet part out loud, not because it was incorrect - unless I missed the rash of DIE experts and cultural leaders who vocally denounced the poster or the Smithsonian? Did anyone say they were wrong?

You may be right. I certainly can't find anyone talking about it from a left-wing perspective.

While I don't expect riots and public executions, I was hoping to find more backlash...

Yes you can acknowledge the differences and remain a classical liberal. The problem is it does very much matter why there is a difference contra Hanania.

It matters because government, corporations, and academia keep trying to solve problems that can’t be solved due to HBD. Their premise is Group X performs worse than Group Y therefore it must be discrimination. Let’s do all of these programs (transfer wealth, affirmative action, decry success) to help alleviate the difference. That is, they are willing to incur a cost because they think at the end of the day the status quo ante is not optima due to racism (ie if you do enough, Group X will act like Group Y resulting in a benefit that exceeds the cost).

However, if the status quo ante is not due to racism but merely gene luck, then it doesn’t follow all of the costs should be borne because the payoff will never be realized.

Judging people entirely by what they wrote years ago is such a weak, modern thing.

Go back a century or two (or even to the middle of the twentieth century) and huge ideological journeys over the course of a lifetime, from left to right, from right to left, back again, across religion and secularism, republicanism and absolutism, liberty and tyranny are commonplace among public intellectuals, writers, politicians and philosophers.

One thing arguably quite unique about progressive cancel culture is its utter resistance to even capitulation or apology. Most historical ideological movements were quite happy to adopt former foes if they agreed to repent. Yes, you had to convert or die, but at least you could convert. This was the normal thing. Often only those who refused out of principle to convert, or (in rarer cases) who were believed to have converted insincerely, were not spared. The CCP famously even spared and converted the last Emperor of China, who was widely considered to have gladly sold out his countrymen to the Japanese (and so was not merely hated for being a monarch).

When the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, Puyi was repatriated to China after negotiations between the Soviet Union and China. Puyi was of considerable value to Mao, as Behr noted: "In the eyes of Mao and other Chinese Communist leaders, Pu Yi, the last Emperor, was the epitome of all that had been evil in old Chinese society. If he could be shown to have undergone sincere, permanent change, what hope was there for the most diehard counter-revolutionary? The more overwhelming the guilt, the more spectacular the redemption-and the greater glory of the Chinese Communist Party"

It speaks to the fear, the emptiness, the hollowness of progressive ideology that they actually don't believe they can facilitate sincere conversions to the faith. 'If you once denounced us, you are an enemy for all time' isn't something that comes from a position of strength but from one of weakness.

Most historical ideological movements were quite happy to adopt former foes if they agreed to repent. Yes, you had to convert or die, but at least you could convert.

This isn't right: progressive activists are more than happy to accept converts, as long as they abase themselves completely and become zealous true-believers. If you continue to challenge their authority or their most important commitments, you have not actually repented in a meaningful way.

Consider Peter Boghossian's one-time collaborator Émile P. Torres, turned dogged antagonist of rationalism and BFF of Timnet Gebru. Hanania didn't do this: he merely renounced some of his earlier beliefs. It's as if Martin Luther trimmed his sails a bit and decided he would only stand behind sixty-three of his theses after all, and, by the way, the Pope still isn't legitimate.

It was a big change for him, but as far as progressives are concerned, he hasn't even started to repent.

Consider Peter Boghossian's one-time collaborator Émile P. Torres, turned dogged antagonist of rationalism and BFF of Timnet Gebru.

Torres never said anything even 1/10th as radical as what Hanania writes today, let alone under the unearthed pseudonym. Also, New Atheism was orthogonal rather than hostile to 'the left' or progressive consensus until GamerGate, and by that point (2014/2015) the movement had largely already died, a full six years into the Obama administration.

I actually do think there are counterexamples, even radical ones, but they tend to be working class, 'prison gang' type tattooed neo-nazis who undergo a full ideological conversion and then join progressive charities as public speakers to at-risk kids or whatever, they're not intellectuals.

I agree with you, without reservation. Moreover, I loved reading your post I was responding to - the historical perspective is useful and relevant in Hanania's case.

But I stand by my point, which is that while Hanania has come a long way, I don't think it's reasonable to describe him as a convert. Moreover, as you observe, progressive activists would welcome converts - from whatever ideological distance. But the price of conversion is complete submission, not apology or even renouncing myriad specific offenses. I don't think any American intellectual is willing to pay that price, whether it's because of pride, tribal instincts, or the manifest philosophical defects of the social justice worldview, which means we may never see CCP-style conversions. (At least I'm crossing my fingers that it never comes to that.)

I'm not the first person to note how ironic this is for the political wing most likely to claim to support rehabilitative criminal justice.

Having different (and harsher) standards for political criminals as opposed to ordinary ones is nothing new.

The CCP famously even spared and converted the last Emperor of China, who was widely considered to have gladly sold out his countrymen to the Japanese (and so was not merely hated for being a monarch).

In fairness, this was less about their philosophy on forgiveness (his wife, the empress, died in a CCP prison) and a very large part to do with them learning from the backlash the Bolsheviks experieced after killing the Romanovs.

There are some incredible, SNL-skit worthy scenes of Puyi trying to reintegrate to normal life and going to get an ID from the local government office that go somewhat like:

Bored DMV-esque Employee: Name?

Puyi: Yaozhi

Employee: Former occupation?

Puyi: Uhhh Emperor of the Celestial Kingdom of China

Employee: Haha no seriously though

In fairness, this was less about their philosophy on forgiveness (his wife, the empress, died in a CCP prison) and a very large part to do with them learning from the backlash the Bolsheviks experieced after killing the Romanovs.

What backlash?

Several of the other nations of Europe were led by extended family of the Romanovs and the royal families of the UK, Spain, Denmark, and Germany, as well as the Vatican, all tried (incompetently and vascillatingly) to rescue them. The UK's first serious diplomatic outreach to my knowledge to the Soviet leadership was about protecting the lives of the Romanovs “Any violence inflicted on the Emperor or his family would have an extremely deplorable and indignant effect on the public opinion of this country.” The murder of Nihcolas II (the rest of them wouldn't be known till much later) poisoned the international community against them significantly during the era the USSR was making its first attempts to establish diplomatic relations. Many countries issued public condemnations, including those with no familial relation like Italy, France, and the US, and even nonaligned countries such as Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden.

Ah, thanks. I was thinking about domestic backlash.

Ah, got it. The reaction within Russia was pretty muted right?

Well, we were kinda busy killing each other. The Whites tried to use the news of the execution to vilify the Reds, but since it was them who had deposed the emperor in the first place to an almost unanimous approval, that wasn't really effective. Why grieve about the family of a citizen Romanov when your own brother's family is equally dead?

Fair points all.

Bored DMV-esque Employee: Name?

Puyi: Yaozhi

Employee: Former occupation?

Puyi: Uhhh Emperor of the Celestial Kingdom of China

Employee: Haha no seriously though

I mean, this is close enough to real life. In his first day as a street sweeper he got lost:

I'm Puyi, the last Emperor of the Qing dynasty. I'm staying with relatives and can't find my way home.

Worth remembering the next time a crazy guy on the street tells you he's royalty! One day I want to read his autobiography, though I imagine it's heavily constrained by censorship.

his wife, the empress, died in a CCP prison

She died of opium withdrawal and (self-imposed) starvation, though, historians don't believe she was murdered. Her brother was later released, worked for the government and died in 2007.

But I agree Puyi's story is funny, has its own charm. It shows how total a regime change is when you can have someone like that around, safe in the knowledge that they are now, truly, a nobody.

Sure, no quibbles (other than that the CCP weren't broadly known for forgiving and rehabilitating most of their ideological enemies). I'll be honest, I mostly commented because I really love that story.

But I agree Puyi's story is funny, has its own charm. It shows how total a regime change is when you can have someone like that around, safe in the knowledge that they are now, truly, a nobody.

Made even more poignant by that he was the figurehead of a failed Qing restoration, and in adulthood still had aspirations to restore the Qing (a good part of how he got convinced to act as a Japanese puppet).

I’ve always found his story (and Wanrong’s) to be quite sad, if not too sympathy-inducing.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats