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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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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.

Just how far does agreeing to respect someone's identity go? Let me introduce you to a strange case that I read about over the weekend, of a Jewish woman named Daryln Madden. Darlyn is much more violent than the typical woman, having murdered at least three people, with the most recently discovered one being the horrifying cold case of Bill Newton:

Newton was murdered shortly after completing what would be his last film, The Grip of Passion. He was last seen alive at Rage Nightclub in West Hollywood, the gay epicenter of Los Angeles. Newton's dismembered body was discovered by a transient in a dumpster near Santa Monica Boulevard the following morning.[2] Only Newton's head and feet were discovered in plastic bags, said his father, Richard Harriman of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. At the time of his murder, LAPD detective Ron Veneman told the Leader-Telegram in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, "We have several leads we're working on but nothing that is solid yet. We have other information we're not at liberty to give out."

Now, if dismembering gay porn stars doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that you typically expect Jewish ladies in Southern California to get up to, there's certainly a good reason for that, and you've probably already guessed the explanation - Daralyn was Darrell at the time that "she" was gruesomely butchering men for fun and profit. Here's where things get weirder though:

Williams discovered that Madden had previously claimed to have killed a man in LA when she was a self-proclaimed white supremacist and skinhead who led a second-life as a male pornstar named Billy Houston.

...

“We’re talking to a person who has swastikas tattooed and is also wearing a knitted pink yarmulke,” Lamberti said. “The person we’re talking to is a gay porn actor, transgender skinhead, Nazi orthodox Jew. You write that down in a sentence, and it’s like, ‘What?’”

Indeed.

So, which of Ms. Madden's identities are to be respected? Is "she" truly an Orthodox Jew, entitled to the superior kosher diet instead of standard prison slop? Well, if a man can become a woman, surely a Nazi can become a Jew, I suppose. Still, even by the standards of trans-in-prison debates, the level of cynicism or true belief (there can't be any in between, right?) to acknowledge Ms. Madden as an authentic Jewish woman boggles the mind. Point deer, make horse.

The counter argument here is rather simple. Edge cases don't need to be the basis for how we construct our society.

Yeah, it's hard to even imagine a more fitting example for the case against 'respecting someones identity' than what you just gave. But if we contrast that with the case of a harmless shut in depressed teenager who has tied their ego to their identity... What's the argument? Are walking contradictions like Madden's more or less common than the teenager? Obviously the teenager is more common and drastically so.

It's not a bridge too far to say that we can respect people on the basis they wish to be respected. We do that all the time. Baked into your example is a whole bunch of protected identities. Jew. Woman. Gay. How far should we go to respect those? And what is the view people generally have towards those identities, and why? Well, the punishment for not respecting these identities is jail time. On the flipside there are special events to celebrate them and belonging to them can offer a variety of special privileges. I mean, women who torture and kill children get a comfy womens prison to go to. Men who can't pay child support get locked in a cell with an AIDS riddled rapist.

If you don't like trannies just say that. Because respecting someones identity goes all the way and no one disagrees with the notion that their ingroup should be respected and protected. If you want to engineer a social norm that says trannies are not kosher, then talk about that. But currently the powers that be are working overtime making trannies into a protected identity just like jews, women and gays are. One schizophrenic jew is not going to stop them. We've paved over far worse to get to where we are today.

Edge cases don't need to be the basis for how we construct our society.

They are, on the other hand, excellent tests for how we think about things.

What's the argument?

The most plainly I can state my position on the matter is that I don't think I should feel morally obligated (less still, be legally obligated) to respect people's stated identities. Instead, I think my obligation to respect someone's identity extends as far as that identity is reflected in the actual reality of the individual and what they seem to wish to gain from using that identity.

If you don't like trannies just say that.

I don't have a generalizable problem with trans-identified individuals. I know trans-identified individuals that are personally pleasant, have made an honest attempt to appear to be their chosen gender, and that require nothing onerous from anyone. As the saying goes, they just want to be left alone. I'm more than happy to provide them with the respect and decency that they want (and in my opinion) deserve.

My point is not that no one should have their stated identity respected, it's that there are examples of people who clearly have fake, illegitimate identification, and that this demonstrates that not all stated identities need to be respected by either individuals or the state. Where that line is will be a matter of legal wrangling and personal inclinations, but I reject the frame that allows a literal Nazi human-butcherer to convert to a Jewish woman when convenient.

I understand your position, and can sympathize with it as I have seen several examples of people claiming identities in bad faith. It runs into trouble, though, when you have to have a mini-trial to determine who's entitled to what.

Well, you only need a "trial" when the outcome is important, like which prison to send an inmate to. And we already have a trial system for that; seems like the judge is in the best position to determine which prison would be appropriate, alongside all the other aspects of sentencing.

But in normal life, if we just acknowledge that it's not Literal Genocide to occasionally use the wrong pronouns, no trial is needed. Sure, if you're one of the rare edge cases where people genuinely mistake what gender you prefer, then you might have to keep announcing it and correcting people. It sucks a little, but not a lot.

I don't think that's enough. It allows for mistakes, but not differences of opinion--it still allows someone to demand use of a pronoun.

Actually I think invoking mistakes here is a smokescreen. None of the trans issues that people are conerned about involve mistakes.

Well, they can demand it, but it's society's support that allows that demand to have teeth. Like @Walterodim says, we need to get back to the point where you had no moral/legal obligation to comply when somebody else tries to control you.

You're right about the rest of the trans issues. I realize I was being a bit naive - bathroom/changing room access, for instance, is both important and far too common to litigate. Ending cancel culture isn't going to help us find a compromise between the two sides of that debate...

Umm, has this Nazi cannibal gay porn star taken any steps towards becoming Jewish? Unlike transgenderism, Jewishness has actual identity standards.

I don't know, the articles I looked at didn't really get into that. The JP one about kosher meals that I linked suggests that the bar is incredibly low though.

The claim that it's easier to determine if someone is Jewish than whether someone is a woman is something I could not have predicted taking seriously just a few years ago.

I mean, it seems like this person’s actual identity is ‘criminally insane’, so I’m comfortable saying they’re neither. Obviously the prison system has other ideas.

For religious purposes, would a penectomy be considered functionally equivalent to a circumcision (albeit a horrifically botched one)?

/s

I agree it's a good test, but if we are not extrapolating our thinking to the relevant larger things in this context, then what we can discuss becomes limited. I like the people I like and I dislike the people I dislike. There's not much there.

If someone I like has an identity, 'fake' or 'real', in whatever sense, I'm not all that fussed about it. If I like them and it's real to them then it's real to me no problem. Because I like them. If it's fake to the outgroup I don't care. So long as they are not harming the ingroup I'd want anyone I like to have everything they need. Especially if the perception is that what they need is coming from the outgroup in some way. (I mean, tl;dr: I tolerate my ingroup, not the outgroup.)

You made Madden an example because they are so very easily outgroupable. No one wants to own the criminally insane outside of extreme circumstance. But if Madden can be used to harm the prospects of the ingroup in some way then that will get called out. Which is the immediate perceptions trannies have whenever this kind of thing gets brought up. And I'd argue their perceptions are entirely correct.

If this topic is only about our personal likes, then we all dislike Madden and there is nothing more to be said. If this is not about our personal taste then it's about respecting people and their identities and how far one could or should go. The only reason this is a topic in modern discourse is because of trannies. This subject, if anything is to be discussed, can only be understood through the lens of trans-rights. And to that end the matter has already been settled.

Trannies will get ingrouped, they will be placed in womens prisons or an extremely expensive alternative. Some women will be raped as a consequence and that's fine. We already accept mass rape as an acceptable price for others to pay for our modern moral sensibilities. The potential fallout and harm that might be caused by a few women being raped in jail is chicken shit compared to what's already been done and celebrated in the name of ending segregation.

We already accept mass rape as an acceptable price for others to pay for our modern moral sensibilities

This is true and you don’t even have to go to desegregation for examples- the US largely accepts that lots of people will get raped in male prisons, after all. Extending it to female prisons is just equality of the sexes.

You're right.

My usual spiel relates to rapes, violent assault and murder, all of which are dramatically exasperated by race tensions and desegregation. But I forgot to mention the two latter ones.

On that front the issue of violence in prisons in general is separate to the additional violence added on top of that due to nothing other than desegregation. The amount of violence added due to that policy dwarfs anything trannies could do in a womens prison. So the meat of the argument is the comparison between those two policies.

I don't think this is true, or at least it's not true in a golden rule sense. If for example you identify as a heterosexual man, but people in your life consistently refused to respect your identity as such, you'd find that pretty offensive I bet.

Explain to me how this affects me? Like all the dudes around me pretend I am gay and thus? The ladies all pretend I'm gay even though they know I am not, so they accept my dates and then make out with me at the bar anyways until the best one "pretends" her way through our wedding and kids and we die together as a totally gay man has totally tricked himself into living like every happy straight man ever. Except he lived life on easymode because he could hang out with any woman at all times (even those with boyfriends which he then could steal away if he so wanted because the delusion only can be maintained up until the boner is in your vagina). What is this burden?

Gay men can't marry straight women?

I was alive in 1999. A person who acted entirely like a straight man, but there was a weird conspiracy theory that predominated that he is secretly gay wouldn't be that badly off.

But this isn't a consistent analogy at all. Trans women who are treated like men aren't worse off than normal men, except when they lash out and act crazy in the face of equal treatment.

More comments

I don't think this is true, or at least it's not true in a golden rule sense. If for example you identify as a heterosexual man, but people in your life consistently refused to respect your identity as such, you'd find that pretty offensive I bet.

If I identified as a heterosexual male and spent my weekends in gay bars picking up guys who I would then have sex with, then for people to refuse to respect my identity as a heterosexual male would be absolutely appropriate whether I liked it or not.

Yeah, it's hard to even imagine a more fitting example for the case against 'respecting someones identity' than what you just gave. But if we contrast that with the case of a harmless shut in depressed teenager who has tied their ego to their identity... What's the argument? Are walking contradictions like Madden's more or less common than the teenager? Obviously the teenager is more common and drastically so.

My argument would be is we can cure those teenagers, partially, by dealing with the Maddens, the Jenners, Levine s,etc and just publicly shaming and laughing at them instead of tolerating and elevating their egregious conduct.

That's sort of a different topic. You're not really respecting their identity by being transphobic about it and maintaining that it's something to be cured, regardless of anything else.

But on that point, marginalizing the already marginalized doesn't, in my view, solve anything. All it does is reinforce the victimary discourse those groups rely on. Sure, it might change the discourse if transphobia wasn't banned to the extent it is now, but how much? For reference, no matter how much fun comedians in the 80's and 90's made of feminists they all have to toe the line today. Society has genuinely changed towards feminist ideals.

You're not really respecting their identity by being transphobic about it and maintaining that it's something to be cured, regardless of anything else.

Well of course, because I believe it is a false consciousness, taught to them by others who are crazy and/or evil and needs to be treated and cured with reality, not coddled until they turn themselves from depressed teens into sterilized depressed teens.

But on that point, marginalizing the already marginalized doesn't, in my view, solve anything. All it does is reinforce the victimary discourse those groups rely on. Sure, it might change the discourse if transphobia wasn't banned to the extent it is now, but how much? For reference, no matter how much fun comedians in the 80's and 90's made of feminists they all have to toe the line today. Society has genuinely changed towards feminist ideals.

That is a true description of the feminist victories in the culture war, but we are all the worse for it, these poor confused teens most of all.

Marginalizing the trans advocates solves quite a bit in this frame, because it means that teens are not confused by the message that being trans makes you a special snowflake who will receive unearned accolades (as most trans public figures get). Yes often these kids are marginalized, typically they were before they became trans. The transness is their hope for relevancy. It is no coincidence that trans kids, statistically, almost always have a mother with a mental illness, often severe such as borderline personality. There is a genetic component, likely, to be predispositioned to a mental illness (trans being the newest faddish one) and also the fact that having a trans kid is a status icon for this subset of mothers.

I hope for a return to sanity and we need not have a new age of scientism akin to the lobotomy craze of the mid 20th century, alas I despair we will have another era of quack-psychiatry butchery.

The study was conducted in 1991, long before the politicization of gender ideology and gender medicine

Yes, but now any study would almost certainly be a lie, so its the best we have, and probably ever will.

But if we contrast that with the case of a harmless shut in depressed teenager who has tied their ego to their identity... What's the argument?

The principle that it's never to the long-term benefit of the subject to affirm the "importance" of identity. In mental health terms, it's long-term destructive to humor a patient's delusion. In societal terms, it's long-term destructive to stress identitarianism. In individual terms, it's harmful to place so much importance on one unstable factor that puts them in natural conflict with other individuals/groups. And I'm an individualist!

If an institution gives preferential treatment to individuals based entirely on their identity, it’s absolutely understandable why someone would fake it if all it takes is self-declaration.

It’s completely the prison’s own fault if Nazi inmates are pretending to be Jewish so that they don’t eat the standard prison slop, and I have little sympathy for the abusive, violent institution that is the US justice system. If they wanted to “fix” the problem, they should make the kosher food as unpalatable and inconvenient as the rest of their offerings, not test inmates for Judaism.

Personally, my preferred solution would be to limit or remove the circumstances where individual identity matters at all. For instance, my preferred solution to the pronoun issue would just be to remove gendered pronouns completely; in languages like Hungarian or Turkish for example, they don’t exist and people communicate just fine, while romance languages go further than English and have almost every single noun and adjective be gendered. Obviously this is not always practical but the general goal should be towards less identity politics, not more.

It’s completely the prison’s own fault if Nazi inmates are pretending to be Jewish so that they don’t eat the standard prison slop

No, it's the court cases taken to force the prison system to cater to such extremes instead of being allowed to judge on a case-by-case basis of "Okay, Shlomo here really is Jewish but Darrell is just taking the piss".

Remember our dear friend Demi Minor, the 'woman' who got two women pregnant when transferred to a women's prison? In compliance with the law suit taken by the ACLU New Jersey (who are all about that decarceration) to force the New Jersey Department of Corrections to allow self-identified trans people to be jailed in the 'appropriate' prison:

New Jersey has adopted a policy that requires state prisons to house transgender people according to their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth.

The policy change is part of a settlement the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey announced Tuesday, and it puts the state among the handful of others with similar policies.

The ACLU of New Jersey and attorney Robyn Gigl of GluckWalrath LLP sued the N.J. Department of Corrections and its officers in August 2019 on behalf of a trans woman who went by the pseudonym Sonia Doe in court documents.

Prior to Doe's lawsuit, the department's policy was to house people according to their genitalia, according to Tess Borden, an ACLU of New Jersey staff attorney on the case.

...As part of the settlement, which the ACLU of New Jersey filed in the Mercer County Superior Court on Tuesday, the department will adopt an agencywide policy meant to protect people in state custody who are transgender, intersex and nonbinary, according to a press release.

In addition to the policy change, the department will pay Doe $125,000 in damages and will pay her attorney fees.

...New Jersey is now one of a handful of states that have passed laws or implemented policies requiring that inmates be housed according to their gender identity. Borden said the state's policy goes further than most others, though, because it includes provisions that will help the department of corrections implement the policy.

"The purpose section includes the word 'dignity' — that it's the purpose of this policy in the New Jersey Department of Corrections to recognize the dignity of transgender, intersex and nonbinary people in its custody," she said. The policy also requires officers to use a trans inmate's proper pronouns, including gender-neutral pronouns such as they/them, and the gender neutral honorific "Mx." instead of "Mr." or "Mrs."

Funnily enough, Tess and ACLU NJ had nothing to say when contacted about the Demi Minor case. Odd, that.

There's not much a prison governor can do even if they think "this is damn stupid" when informed "yeah well the judge ruled we gotta do this, oh yeah and make sure the wardens use 'Mx' when addressing the violent drug addict rapist murderer, you have to respect their feminine dignity".

If they wanted to “fix” the problem, they should make the kosher food as unpalatable and inconvenient as the rest of their offerings, not test inmates for Judaism.

Given what I know of Ashkenazi food, this is much easier done than said.

make the kosher food as unpalatable and inconvenient as the rest of their offerings

Or, they could make their regular food better.

Hahaha. More seriously, the kosher food is explicitly noted to be prepackaged meals that may have more calories, probably because they’re prepackaged. This is probably also not great food, and prisoners prefer it because it’s packaged, not because it’s better.

Personally, my preferred solution would be to limit or remove the circumstances where individual identity matters at all. For instance, my preferred solution to the pronoun issue would just be to remove gendered pronouns completely; in languages like Hungarian or Turkish for example, they don’t exist and people communicate just fine, while romance languages go further than English and have almost every single noun and adjective be gendered. Obviously this is not always practical but the general goal should be towards less identity politics, not more.

Reshaping the entire English language in order to deal with a novel form of identity politics doesn't seem as practical as simply refusing to recognize that novel form of idpol at all. It seems to create a pretty bad set of incentives.

It seems to me that "less idpol" means not chasing after the compromise point between the status quo and whatever new idpol (including the ludicrous notion that a man imprisoned in a prison with men - I assume you want to keep it this way - is somehow so not-a-man that we need to play this pretend game of eliminating gender distinctions...while maintaining the central distinction that keeps them in that jail in the first place) has now been spun up.

I think we are overfocused on identity and have an impoverished shared/folk understanding of what it is actually like to 'be a self'.

While this was true previously it is particularly true now, with the internet, which creates I argue a sense of disembodiment.

Being a self is much more than just having an identity. A self is the space that our separate, overlapping identities arise in. It contains something ineffable that can't be captured by propositions around 'who one is'

Now we obviously need to operate with others which is where identity/persona is relevant. But we should enrich our vocabulary of what it means to 'be a human's, with all its attendent existential anxieties so that we don't mistake ourselves and each other as identities, as well as helping young people understand their experience.

I know I'm a bit late, but that reminds me of a thought I often have, which sadly I'm not able to properly put into words:

A year ago I was telling my father about people I met and their identities(mostly a few strangely similar depressed feminists) and about me struggling with having no real identity I can think of. And he was extremely annoyed with the way people today emphasize their identities and with me feeling like I needed one. I on the other hand wasn't sure whether anything really changed or whether most people were always this way and their identities just were different to today. Maybe being transgender/woke/MAGA/PUA-adjacent is similar to how being an officer at the royal navy in the mid 19th century felt. Probably there was also a lot of behavior which was unnecessary for the fulfillment of their duties, but which helped to sustain one(or a few) coherent identity. My father thinks, that this is maybe true, but in the 70s and 80s and more generally after WW2 people in western countries actually started having less and less strict identities and we were kind of at peak individualism when it comes to identity construction and now have regressed a bit.

Anyone any intuition on whether the "strict/normed identity" vs "plain/naked individual" actually changes and if in what way historically?

It would be interesting to look at what people find salient, what identities they inhabit, in different times. I imagine a colonial governer in India would draw on that tradition of 'Great Englishman'. All of these kind of identities, nationhood, ancestry identities seem to have a strong component of fortifying myth, while other identities are perhaps just closer to roles, eg engineer, internet troll etc. Which is not to contrast or make any particular point except to try to tease 'identity' out a bit.

My point was more around how we don't typically have good language to describe our moment by moment experience as a Self and what that encompasses. From religious traditions and phenomenological philosophers, cognitive science, we actually have a rich model and language of direct experience, but this hasn't made it into the public space.

I mean existence is actually pretty weird. For example it's possible to find yourself in fairly uncertain states about what is actually happening in moment to moment consciousness and life and our interactions with others can be coloured by a certain weirdness. While we can often retreat to a sensible perspective of ego, or small self, with our identities, beliefs, and homoncular experience, we also may be plunged into existential anxiety and shifting reality.

I think the failure to communicate this reality underequips young people to appreciate that they might have difficult, uncomfortable experiences where they don't feel like a coherent whole. They might mistake this as a kind of mismatch, where something is wrong with them, and search for a path of certainty by over attaching to an identity they can perform.

I very much agree with the weirdness of human experience. I sometimes find it so strange, that I seriously wonder whether reality is really all that real.

I am glad that I know that my family understands this and I will try to show my future children that having even unsettling weird experiences is a normal part of human condition.

I am formulating a post on this. I'm thinking that the branding, or framing, of strangeness or weirdness might not be a great draw, but nonetheless there is a great potential uniter in a better description of how we actually experience reality. Of course religious people are already playing in this space, but this always requires some extra beliefs.

For me, this sense of reality, which as you describe can include a feeling of unreality, has been the starting point to a notion of God, but a God akin the Spinoza's God, ie God as the 'other' or the universe. The universe is somehow unfolding in front of us and while quite strange is also magical. It takes me out of the plain scientific frame of my specific beliefs and thoughts running around my brain and into some other space.

Is "she" truly an Orthodox Jew, entitled to the superior kosher diet instead of standard prison slop?

Are we taking a principled stand to force a particular form of slop on prisoners rather than letting some get kosher slop? Who cares if prisoners suddenly decide they are Jewish or vegetarian or something? Let's not strain ourselves too hard in an attempt to stop such petty tricks.

The Kosher meals are superior and valued in prisons. They can be traded for other goods.

That said, prisons shouldn't be doing custom diets. Prisoners can eat what they're given. If they're given the choice to do that or starve, their clergy can direct them on the proper course of action including providing them alternatives paid for by their ministry.

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

'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.

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

deleted

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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A Look at Shame in Modern Society

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That said putting extra sugar in surely doesn’t help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So roughly 10x as much sugar.

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

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

Some theorize that chemicals in the drinking water causing obesity.

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

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

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

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

There has been a change in the natural environment.

Food become more available, more palatable and cheaper.

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

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

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

There has been a change in the natural environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't you dare dunk on my Leberkäse!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Companies with too many fat employees can be fined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(and sincerely hopes noone tries!).

Why?

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

Eww. Although you and my wife would agree.

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, and the American anti-smoking campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stereotype does checkout.

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

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

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

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

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

General populace just can't beat hyperstimulus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah I like this one. Good point.


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