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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30140 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Contrary to your position, I find the discussion in former Culture War as well as here in The Motte quite valuable, it not only serves as an aggregator of things happening, but many of the phenomena described here helped me navigating real world situations regarding the Culture War like for instance those in my workplace that to my amazement started to ramp up in last year or two. Compared to that, many of my colleagues are like megafauna waiting to go extinct one way or another by stepping on some mine unknown to them. I do not share neither the loathing for denizens of this place, nor self-loathing you display here. And I definitely do not share your view on moral superiority of Scott Alexander and his "niceness" field.

Nevertheless this would probably only "devolve" into another discussion with a loser hater witch that you are no longer interested in. So I wish for you to enjoy whatever comes next. Take care.

I feel the same way. This place is valuable as a sort of internet speakeasy. I don’t think we’re the most rigorous debate society ever, though I think we do fairly well. But what we do well is allowing people to express views that cannot be safely expressed elsewhere. I find that by itself extremely valuable, as so much of society is ruled by nannies who want to silence anything that might hurt feelings. I find that to be extremely harmful because ideas suppressed don’t go away, and some of them might be true. I’d rather face such things head on.

The Babylon project was mankind's last, best, hope for peace. It failed.

Quality contribution right here. Love it.

Sidenote, anyone know where you can stream this nowadays?

It’s on Tubi if you want an app.

For my tv needs I'm using - fmovies . to

Odysee has an insane amount of treasure found on the high sees. Their search feature kind of sucks though, but it's worth a try.

But in the year of the shadow war it became something better. Our last best hope for victory.

I find it important to sometimes take time away from all heavy controversial stuff, whether personal or political, and just do innocent stuff that I enjoy, whether that's watching videos of puppies, or reading about sports (which is often controversial but rarely heavy), or watching adventure videos on YouTube, or going outside, etc.

When I am in politics mode, I find myself bouncing back and forth.

First I go read some stuff in mainstream media or Reddit and get angry at the leftoids (the left/right distinction is pretty meaningless but I use these terms as loose pointers). Stupid fucking imbeciles! Unselfaware hypocrites who hide their desire for power behind virtue signalling! Why can't they see what's so obvious to me? Useless swine!...

So then I go to TheMotte or 4chan to get some relief, but there I get angry at the righoids. Dumb, dull-witted morons! Cruel, cold sociopaths! Supercilious geeks with withered hearts covered by layers of defense mechanisms! Fuck all of them!...

So then I go back to mainstream media or Reddit and get angry at the leftoids again...

And then I go back to TheMotte or 4chan and get angry at the rightoids again...

I have a pretty dark sense of humor and can find a lot of twisted shit really funny, so a lot of the time I'm just reading political content and laughing my ass off. I like to go to rdrama sometimes, at least they make fun of both leftoids and rightoids and understand the virtue of brevity, but I usually get tired of rdrama after a while too, there are only so many layers of irony, smugness, and compassionlessness one can endure before one wants to go look at some flowers or just go to the bar and talk to actual people in the flesh.

When my humor runs out and I start to find all the politics actually heavy instead of fun, I know I gotta take a break. Step away, go enjoy sensory experience and be around people, maybe go out and try to get laid... And when I get out and about I am usually reminded that offline, most people actually don't seem to care much about politics, and the ones that do are usually not raging leftoids or rightoids. Well, or they're hiding it, but I think for the most part that's not the case, most people just genuinely are not very gung-ho about politics.

Many have said it before and I will say it again. The Internet really overrepresents the kind of people who care enough about politics to spend all day posting about it. One person who is obsessed with politics will tend to generate 100 times more online political content than the average person. As a result, when you are reading about politics on the Internet, you are not reading a fair sample of the overall population's political thoughts. You are reading, largely, the thoughts of the kind of people who, for whatever reasons, spend a lot of time writing about politics on the Internet.

TheMotte is far from perfect and I can criticize it all day long, whether for the transparent and weak attempts to get around the rules that many posters consciously or unconsciously engage in when they feel like posting a bit of emotional venting disguised as logic and rationality, or for the lack of simple human compassion that I detect from some. But at least here I usually do not immediately get called either a communist cuck or a racist fascist when I disagree with people, so there's that. I think that relatively speaking, and I mean very relatively speaking, this place is still an island of sanity, at least if you compare it to other places where people are willing to openly discuss extremely controversial political topics.

I hope that you find a way to reconcile your feelings and find peace in this world.

The one thing I disagree with is I am nice on the internet. I would say the same things to people in person especially after a drink or two. Maybe I’m just autistic enough. The one area where I won’t speak freely is on twitter under my real name. For well obvious reasons.

Seems like I got a permaban from Reddit today. So I am retired from Reddit. I guess IP or something but my phone and laptop accounts got linked. And since I’ve gotten a few don’t be evil messages for freely speaking about anti-trans arguments guess I’m not getting back in.

On net my guess is Reddit made the world a worse place. Now I won’t even have a clue how people on the left think.

I enjoyed reading your posts, and wish you well.

Out of interest in the phenomena you describe: I don't personally relate to this, though. The most fun I've had here in the past week was this exchange, where I poorly expressed an (imo) interesting, entirely non-culture-war concept, which led to a tangential discussion of how good-faith someone was being in a voice debate. The debater I was defending held the opposite of my object-level position. I mostly just enjoyed getting into the gears of some random topic.

More generally, less than half of my comments are directly related to the culture war, and of those that are, probably more than half of them oppose my partisan lean. Most of the posts I enjoy reading also aren't directly culture-war.

My favorite comments to read (aside from 'new true insights') are the ones that capably disagree with me - this often includes pro-religion commnts. While I oppose religion on technical grounds, there are clearly many tensions in the space between christianity and liberal atheism that aren't resolved and should be.

But I do discuss CW topics. So why don't I get heated at all, even though I have very strong views? I'm used to drama tier ironic insults, so partisan overstatements aren't notably high-heat. "Annoying partisan does bad-faith attack" just seems like ... yeah, most people suck at debating, even people who are good at debating still suck a lot of the time, I suck sometimes too, just ignore it and move onto the next interesting post. I try to situate political ideas relative to historical context and their consequentialist impact on society - comparing today's 'bad thing' both to the wonders of modern life and its grand catastrophes (which don't really inspire rage as much as they do quiet dismay). Not as a psychological trick, but as an entirely practical way to understand their impact. Maybe you believe civilization is decaying morally, maybe you believe AI is about to take over - and if these are practical things you're trying to understand and fight in a small way, what about atheist #5 or republican #17 doing annoying response #351 is interesting enough to be mad about?

Hopefully my fat acceptance post didn't contribute to this.

I try to situate political ideas relative to historical context and their consequentialist impact on society - comparing today's 'bad thing' both to the wonders of modern life and its grand catastrophes (which don't really inspire rage as much as they do quiet dismay). Not as a psychological trick, but as an entirely practical way to understand their impact. Maybe you believe civilization is decaying morally, maybe you believe AI is about to take over - and if these are practical things you're trying to understand and fight in a small way, what about atheist #5 or republican #17 doing annoying response #351 is interesting enough to be mad about?

This post actually made me understand some of the points you've been trying to make elsewhere a bit more accurately. I do my best to view events in a historical context as well, but I think some of our prior disagreements stemmed from a different understanding of the significance of certain events and actions in politics.

I was very sympathetic when you wrote your first post, now I'm rather bemused. If you like it here, stay, if you don't, go. If you want to write a farewell post, that's fair enough, but I think you should only get one of those. This ain't an airport, as they say.

I think I also disagree with your main thesis. I can understand the Culture War bumming you out, I've been there, but my impression is that it wound down. This is not the Summer of Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests, we're not in lockdown, MeToo is not claiming a scalp every day, and it's a far cry from the fever pitch of The Trumpening. Sure, there's plenty of horrible stuff going on that you can complain about, the ground lost during these peaks of the Culture War is not going to be won back easily, if ever, but the bad juju itself seems to be fading. If I had to zero in on where you have a point, it would be this:

There have been several posts in our history (one very recent) by women interested in the motte, begging for other women who also like discussing controversial ideas to show themselves, please. I suspect the contrarianness, and closely related firmness of opinion and argumentativeness makes it difficult for women to find it enjoyable here. It's not that women don't have controversial or interesting ideas, but that, like me, they are on average higher in neuroticism, and the sort of intense argumentativeness and debate culture you find here can be incredibly off-putting. I know women in my life who enjoy highly motte-like conversations, but who have always found this community off-putting for that very reason.

Ages ago I'd have these sort of political discussions with my brother. One time his wife told me that every time we start she has to leave the room, because she feels like we're about to kill each other. We were just having fun.

I get it, it's not for everyone, and it's certainly no foul that it's not for you. But why do you have to shit on me for enjoying it?

I’ll just take this opportunity to say: not every space has to be welcoming to everyone! And that’s ok! Really!

I think it would be great if more women were encouraged to post here. But not at the expense of changing our existing culture and standards.

I know a woman who might fit right in here, not sure if she's into debating.

Fairly smart, rather fierce (due to size and dedication not a joke martial artist), guessing about 1.5-2sd+ above norm. Stunned me by bringing up eugenics on a date. Also liked to establish dominance with her German shepherds by play biting them.

I fell out of contact with her after dating didn't work out. She did however tell me she'd like having a beer and talking sometimes though.

Was ten years back. Not sure if I should try contacting her. (Tbh I doubt she remembers me, I'm nowhere near as memorable as she was).

My calculation is reminding her off her then offer could, at worst embarrass me privately, but it's really not in my comfort zone.

Yeah, and on the other hand, when in I saw them mention a woman-only forum with motte-ish vibes, my first thought was "What are you doing? Don't mention in publically!". I breathed a sigh of relief when it turned out there's a paywall, and another when it turned it's not anonymous, otherwise they'd be sure to get an influx of guys that would kill the vibe of their community.

It just seems to me that in the modern world you're given way too much information than you can handle. You receive the news all over the world every day and do you know there's a war going on and here's the latest about that, also someone is dying in Africa due to a military coup, and somewhere is a genocide...probably. Oh and don't forget about the climate change that's going to kill us all....

This information stays with me for days on end. Sure some things I just forget due to not caring or just because the information provided didn't hold in my brain, like I know about the coup, but no more than that and my brain just leaves it as not important. But other things just sit there, and very frequently I just start thinking about them even though I should really finish work on the project (procrastinating is a thing). Sometimes consciously, most times....... it ends up like this. It's like the empty space is running out on my hard drive and I'm just hoarding everything dating back to my childhood and refusing to dump it.

Just feels like humans are not designed for this type of information overload (especially if you can consider it "too much and too fast") and living in the old times was simpler.

We were never designed for this level of information intake. We're designed to live and have relationships in villages of a couple of hundred people max, with concordant gossip. Not drinking from the firehose of social media weaponised to trigger and exploit our emotions.

You can push what you've said further and imagine a dystopian Warhammer 40k type setting where the capital planetary administration receives reports from thousands of worlds of all sorts of unimaginable horrors. Anyone with access to that information stream would have to either become completely emotionally unresponsive or go insane.

I saw an interview with Sam Harris the other day on Diary of a CEO. He talks about how he deleted Twitter and his mental health improved exponentially. It's a common story, but Sam is ostensibly meant to have a strong mind and even he had to take a step back.

Given that you've blocked me and wrote this post shortly after I replied to you, I can't help but feel like I'm one of the people you're talking about. I don't personally feel like an asshole or like someone who has particularly inflexible opinions (outside my bugbears wrt to Russiagate), but c'est la vie. I can't recall getting angry at anyone on here, even if I disagree with them, and I find the argumentativeness animating rather than dispiriting. For the record, there wasn't any animosity or desire for point-scoring in my comments. But then again I'm a poster who cut their teeth on anonymous imageboards, so maybe my own internal evaluation is miscalibrated when compared to the broader internet. I've noticed more of a compulsion to post here in some cases, but the only negative aspersion I feel like casting is that it sometimes feels like the internet points I get from posting is more closely related to the position that I take rather than the quality of my post. That said...

And I myself can identify. I've thought about leaving dozens of times, because I said something that got negative pushback, or was upset by people making strong claims with which I have fundamental values clashes. (I'm sure I trigger the same response in people, and I'm sorry.) Fortunately I have just barely enough sense to stop before I start shouting curse words at people, but trust me when I say I've come close (and that was what I was worried about a while ago when I said I was afraid I'd start breaking the rules). Just recently I nearly threw my computer across the room reading some of the latest threads, which clearly demonstrates that it's not healthy I continue to be a user here. I have never left because I crave culture war content, but I have stopped talking about some of the bugbears for which I have received the least positive feedback, especially religious content.

If you are getting this angry and this potentially violent about words on an internet forum you absolutely should take a break from them and you're doing the right thing. Stress and anxiety of the kind that expresses itself in curse-word shouting and physical violence is bad for the health of the soul and body both. While I would enjoy continuing to read your posts on here(though sadly this seems one-sided), I hope for your own sake that you're able to get yourself into a more stable and healthy position.

For what is worth, I saw nothing extraordinary about that exchange. Thinking about this I maybe do have one obese friend (with BMI slightly over 30) who I really like and who is funny and very good company to be around. But he does not share my interests with other friends in my circle for things like hiking, skiing or even long walks around the city if we go somewhere on roadtrip or whatever. So from my personal experience you exaggerate a bit, but then maybe you live in a slightly different social bubble.

I live in a place that made the news due to how attractive and fit the median person was. So many people were so good looking and in such good shape that it made a tourist from the UK feel bad about themselves when they went to the beach because their relative attractiveness took such a big hit when compared to being back home.

I think it's healthy to take breaks from social media at different points so qdos. I suspect I might be a different age from you because my expectations are very low for this kind of site (at the same time I really enjoy it).

From my perspective any sense of a 'community' in such places is already illusory, which doesn't mean there's not connection, shared perspectives etc but it's not real life and for me it's at the level of infotainment - sometimes very good infotainment, but not really anything to get hung up about.

The best thing about the motte, is the lack of censoriousness. People are free to express ideas people might find odious but that is what free speech is. I'm taken aback somewhat by the views some people have landed with but I'm not adversely affected by them.

Something that shifted for me with 'ideas' was at around age 40 i read some Jung and became intensely interested in the bodily feeling of being triggered by other peoples ideas. I started to actively lean in to this and it has helped me become more detached from various debates because I am also interested in my own thoughts, ideas and reactions and other peoples commentary is in fact fuel for this process. It also goes along with Haidt's moral tastebuds ideas. I may not agree with someones ideas but if I'm not triggered I'm actually in a better place to perhaps see where they're coming from. Perhaps it's an age thing.

Practically and without wanting to sound condescending, I scroll through a lot here without reading much. I'm not inclined to care enough about us politics, HBD paradigms or atheist argument chains. There's also stuff I don't comment on because I have no particular insight but I enjoy reading, such as law, history, economics etc. And then there's a few nuggets that resonate really well each week as well as my own culture war pet topics. I know the sense of despair that people seem so at odds but I guess that's just the world?

On comparison with Scotts community i don't actually believe 'niceness' is a value though it may coincide with one at times. I suspect there must be a lot of interesting discussion wherever he is but am guessing it would be prone to status games and idolatry. The motte is good because it's like that semi-grotty pub in the wrong part of town where you engage, or overhear, people not like you. And I'd warn against people mimicking Scotts style. I see it here often falling flat and adding unnecessary word count.

Trump has been indicted (again), this time in Georgia, under RICO charges. The charges against him and a large number of co-conspirators relate to efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Full indictment here.

We've seen a range of charges laid against Trump in varying jurisdictions, and I think it's fair to say the cases have varying strength. These new charges seem to me to be on the strong end of the spectrum.

Helpfully, the indictment is painfully clear at every point as to what particular acts constitute which particular crimes or elements of crimes. This makes it a lot easier to assess for an uneducated layman like me. On at least some of the charges, it would appear that he's deeply screwed. E.g. "Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer" seems to be open and shut, and carries a minimum 1 year sentence. He also has no capacity to pardon himself if he is elected President, as these are not federal charges.

As far as I can tell Trump's only hope to escape conviction here is jury nullification.

Wouldn't it have been nice if all the indictments were like this.

If solicting a government official to violate their oath of office is a crime punishable by 1 year per instance, then the very second a libertarian government gets in every single democrat and half of republicans will be put in the work camps for repeatedly soliciting politicians to pass gun control and violate their oath to defend the constitution (which includes the second amendment).

Also every single crime will now be a life sentence because asking police officers and judges to go easy on you will now be likewise criminal solicitation to violate the law and not uphold it.

This law is a blatant violation of not only free speech, but the right to petition, it is not on the public not to ask politicians and government officials not to violate their oaths, it is on the government officials not to violate it.

Notably the first president or public official ever convicted in any way related to their oath will not be convicted for violation, which has basically never been adjudicated and has no precedent, not even rank madness like Lincoln bringing in a draft never mentioned in the constitution or the illegally ratified 16th amendment which makes a mockery of every privacy and property right in the constitution or english common law...

But instead the first notable conviction for anything oath related would be of an elected American President, not for any war crime, not for any violation of American's rights, not for corruption, not for colluding with hostile foreign powers (as FDR certainly did with Stalinist Russia), but for asking a state official to review something the state official didn't....

If Trump can go down for this every soul who's ever set foot in DC could be hanged. And I would lead the revolutionary tribunals to do it.

If solicting a government official to violate their oath of office is a crime punishable by 1 year per instance, then the very second a libertarian government gets in every single democrat and half of republicans will be put in the work camps for repeatedly soliciting politicians to pass gun control and violate their oath to defend the constitution (which includes the second amendment).

These are plainly not analogous. In the gun control case, those advocating gun control clearly don't view it as a violation of the second amendment, whereas as I understand it the charge against Trump is that he knowingly advocated an action which would violate oaths of office.

They are well aware via plain reading of the second amendment and any of the surrounding documentation, as their is enough evidence that they did know the text of the second amendment or should have known such as makes no difference.

But even if we allow that by your logic the tens of millions of democrats who have at some point said "The Second Amendment says this, that's why politicians need to get rid of it" Would thenforce be guilty anytime they advocated gun-control, and probably on every individual count.

Think of all the democrats who at some point said something like "the constitution was written by slaveowners, we don't need to listen to what slaveowners wrote about slaveowner's rights to own guns" All of them go to prison under this standard, that's hundreds of thousands if not millions of democrats.

They are well aware via plain reading of the second amendment and any of the surrounding documentation, as their is enough evidence that they did know the text of the second amendment or should have known such as makes no difference.

I think there is ample evidence that a reading of the 2nd Amendment vastly different to that which you advocate can reasonably be taken; even if you disagree with it there is a legitimate perspective that rejects what you consider to be the 'plain reading'. See, for instance, cases like Aymette v. State of Tennessee, which held that the right to 'bear arms' was a political and group right rather than an individual one, such that the 'legislature have the power to prohibit the keeping or wearing weapons dangerous to the peace and safety of the citizens', as the 2nd Amendment (and the provisions of the Tennessee state constitution) guaranteed the right to employ weaponry only in 'civilized warfare'. Hence it upheld a ban on the concealed carrying of knives. Also, because it exists as a 'group' right for the 'common defense' only, though the general right has to be preserved 'it does not follow that the legislature is prohibited from passing laws regulating the manner in which these arms may be employed'. See also Buzzard, City of Salina v. Blaskley and US v. Adams (1935, not 1966). This interpretation is not in fashion these days, but it is clearly a legitimate view, and indeed to my mind a very persuasive one.

But even if we allow that by your logic the tens of millions of democrats who have at some point said "The Second Amendment says this, that's why politicians need to get rid of it" Would thenforce be guilty anytime they advocated gun-control, and probably on every individual count.

I'm not so sure. While I don't think there are 'tens of millions' who would concede what they want is in violation of the constitution (most would surely give some rationale, either similar to the above, or arguing about 'well regulated etc. etc., or simply advocate changing the constitution), the level of 'solicitation' is vastly different between the incumbent President pressuring officials into changing election results vs. a man on the street with a placard in favour of a gun control proposal he deep down thinks is contrary to the constitution.

"the constitution was written by slaveowners, we don't need to listen to what slaveowners wrote about slaveowner's rights to own guns"

I think this sort of rhetoric is more about being in favour of a 'living constitution' interpretation, but either way what I said before still applies; we should hold an incumbent President to a much higher standard on this kind of thing than an ordinary person, as the extent and harmful effects of the 'solicitation' are vastly different.

The law wasn't written for presidents, it was written for the general population. Indeed an individual state would not be able to write a law binding only the president.

Ergo if it applies to him Retweeting and commenting on a news piece, it applies to literally everyone for all political speech.

It wasn't just about tweets, it's about a letter he sent to Raffensperger asking him to decertify the election. Of course the law applies to everyone equally, but not everyone has an equal capacity to 'importune' to the same extent.

Note: I strongly dislike Trump

How many times are they going to try this and fail? The Steele dossier was an embarrassment for everyone who pushed it.

I don't know how else to say this but Trump derangement syndrome is a thing (compare similar scandals between Trump and Biden). I've heard people cry wolf too many times to see this as anything other than political persecution.

Members of the enterprise also corruptly solicited Georgia officials, including the Secretary of State and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to violate their oaths to the Georgia Constitution and to the United States Constitution by unlawfully changing the outcome of the November 3, 2020, 16 presidential election in Georgia in favor of Donald Trump.

Are you joking or something? There's no way I'm reading a ~100 page indictment, but if that is your idea of a strong charge then the rest of it is probably not worth reading anyways.

Have you listened to the Raffensberger call? It's extremely clear (to me) that Trump is claiming that there are many fraudulent ballots in Georgia (he goes on and on about it, and why he thinks so) -- then asks the people on the call to try to locate some of them. It's right there in the first few minutes.

It may be less clear to you for whatever reasons, but surely this is at least a plausible interpretation of what Trump is trying to say -- and if this were the case, he is definitely not asking anyone to violate their oath. Finding such votes would be required by their oath, surely?

I'm aware that the media has widely reported that Trump was asking R. to fabricate some votes so he could win (probably significantly poisoning the jury pool in the process) but presumably the court will hear the actual call rather than reading Washington Post clippings -- and if you think this interpretation is open-shut I really don't know what to say.

Also included in your quote is the request made to David Ralston, speaker of the house, asking him to convene a special session of the house for the purpose of appointing fake electors.

What's illegal about asking the House to convene for that purpose? It's like saying we have proof Trump illegally ordered a Hawaiian pizza, we even have recordings of him requesting one. Ok -- but what about that is illegal?

Trump is charged under OCGA 16-4-7, which says

A person commits the offense of criminal solicitation when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony, he solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.

The felonious conduct he is accused of trying to solicit from Ralston is under OCGA 16-10-1, which says

Any public officer who willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.

The oath taken by Ralston includes swearing to support and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution of the United States requires that presidential electors are chosen by the manner directed by the state legislatures.

The elector-selection manner directed by the state legislature of Georgia is described in OCGA 21-2-499, which says

(a) Upon receiving the certified returns of any election from the various superintendents, the Secretary of State shall immediately proceed to tabulate, compute, and canvass the votes cast for all candidates described in subparagraph (a)(4)(A) of Code Section 21-2-497 and upon all questions voted for by the electors of more than one county and shall thereupon certify and file in his or her office the tabulation thereof.  In the event an error is found in the certified returns presented to the Secretary of State or in the tabulation, computation, or canvassing of votes as described in this Code section, the Secretary of State shall notify the county submitting the incorrect returns and direct the county to correct and recertify such returns.  Upon receipt by the Secretary of State of the corrected certified returns of the county, the Secretary of State shall issue a new certification of the results and shall file the same in his or her office.

(b) The Secretary of State shall also, upon receiving the certified returns for presidential electors, proceed to tabulate, compute, and canvass the votes cast for each slate of presidential electors and shall immediately lay them before the Governor.  Not later than 5:00 P.M. on the seventeenth day following the date on which such election was conducted, the Secretary of State shall certify the votes cast for all candidates described in subparagraph (a)(4)(A) of Code Section 21-2-497 and upon all questions voted for by the electors of more than one county and shall no later than that same time lay the returns for presidential electors before the Governor.  The Governor shall enumerate and ascertain the number of votes for each person so voted and shall certify the slates of presidential electors receiving the highest number of votes.  The Governor shall certify the slates of presidential electors no later than 5:00 P.M. on the eighteenth day following the date on which such election was conducted.  Notwithstanding the deadlines specified in this Code section, such times may be altered for just cause by an order of a judge of superior court of this state.

The elector appointment method advocated by Trump obviously does not accord with these requirements.

In conclusion, Trump asked Ralston to participate in appointing presidential electors in a manner contrary to Georgia law, which is contrary to the US Constitution, which is contrary to the oath of office Ralston took, therefore Trump is guilty of Solicitation of Violation of Oath by a Public Officer.

He said it on the phone and everything, lock him up!

You're just criminalizing the First Amendment, obviously Trump has a right to ask officials to consider his schemes, this is a crazy reinterpretation of existing norms that would never be tolerated if the target wasn't Trump. Your argument is inherently contradictory, look:

The Constitution of the United States requires that presidential electors are chosen by the manner directed by the state legislatures.

So, if the Georgia state legislature changed the way presidential electors were chosen, what would be unconstitutional about that? What would he incorrect about Trump asking for such if Georgia had actually granted it?

You can Frankenstein together different parts of the law code to create whatever outcome you want, but the result is still a legal abomination. Trump asked for something we decided was illegal, therefore he cajoled officers into violating their oath of office, therefore, jail! If this really impresses you, if this really strikes you as a sound legal and moral argument, I don't know what to say man. This is a blueprint for destroying democracy, because anything could be defined as asking an official to violate their oath of office. Did you protest against the vaccine, when vaccines are in the public interest, and the public interest is in the oath of office? Did your remarks incite hatred by soliciting officials to [...]? You're crazy if you don't see the implication here, and you're sticking your head in the sand if your only counterargument is to cite more laws at me, as if the existence of a statute is evidence in favor of the validity of your interpretation of it.

Give state officials the power to jail federal politicians for making requests of other politicians, and you literally do not have a democracy. It's just rule by lawfare.

So, if the Georgia state legislature changed the way presidential electors were chosen, what would be unconstitutional about that? What would he incorrect about Trump asking for such if Georgia had actually granted it?

Process, my dude. The legislature of Georgia has every right to change their method for selecting electors. They just need to amend the law. And Trump would be entirely in his rights to ask them to do that.

Trump did not ask them to change the prescribed method for choosing electors. He asked them to violate it. The distinction matters. You're allowed to change the law but you're not allowed to break the law.

This is a blueprint for destroying democracy, because anything could be defined as asking an official to violate their oath of office. Did you protest against the vaccine, when vaccines are in the public interest, and the public interest is in the oath of office?

Which oath of office would that be?

Don't be obtuse, you know what my argument is and you have constructed a technicality that in no way addresses it. Who decides the difference between asking for the law to be broken and the law to be changed? You make it sound as though your problem isn't with anything Trump did, but if only he had worded his request slightly differently, everything would have been fine. Come on, charging Trump with "soliciting" officers to "violate their oaths" is crazy, and the fact that this impresses you makes me question your credibility. Do you really not see any problems with this line of argument? The oath of office is a formality that is never enforced, you aren't worried about any precedents here, any unintended consequences, at all? Not even a little bit?

Who decides the difference between asking for the law to be broken and the law to be changed?

The difference is very clear. There is a prescribed process for changing the law. You introduce a bill, it gets voted on, it gets signed, it becomes an act. You don't just appoint someone as an elector who has not met the legislated requirements, which is what Trump asked for.

if only he had worded his request slightly differently, everything would have been fine.

I wouldn't describe it as "slightly" differently, the distinction is large and important in my eyes. It would not have been the same request. But yes, if he had done legal things instead of illegal things, he would indeed have been fine.

you aren't worried about any precedents here, any unintended consequences, at all? Not even a little bit?

If enforcing the law on a criminal sets a precedent, it would be a good precedent to set.

Now, please answer my question. What oath of office includes "the public interest"? I looked and couldn't find one. I'm sure you wouldn't just make something like that up.

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Trump is charged under OCGA 16-4-7, which says

A person commits the offense of criminal solicitation when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony, he solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.

The felonious conduct he is accused of trying to solicit from Ralston is under OCGA 16-10-1, which says

Any public officer who willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.

The oath taken by Ralston includes swearing to support and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

By this logic, every time a President does something unconstitutional (eg, Biden's student loan forgiveness plan), then everyone in Georgia who promoted that policy or petitioned for that policy committed a felony. The prosecutor's use of this law is absolute madness, it criminalizes the losing side of any political battle involving Constitutional issues.

I think the importance difference though is whether those petitioning for a policy themselves know/consider it to be contrary to the constitution, rather than whether it actually is ruled as such by courts. So the point is that Trump didn't care if it was contrary to the constitution, he wanted it done anyway.

Putting pineapple on pizza is a crime against God and Nature (and pizza), and accordingly subject to universal jurisdiction even in the absence of specific local statutory law . I thought this was common knowledge on a forum where high IQ and good taste were the default.

I strenuously disagree with a lot of your political positions but I'm extremely glad that, in the spirit of the Motte, I'm able to reach across the aisle and give you a fist-bump in recognition of your excellent taste in this matter.

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If Trump thinks the election has been stolen, then the electors aren't fake (from Trump's point of view, obviously).

This sounds about the same as the Smith indictment, and is far from open-shut for the same reasons. (mens rea, essentially)

It's the same principle as - you think your wife conspired with a corrupt family court to take your children, so you forge documentation to get a school to turn them over to you, breaking a court order. Maybe you're right. But there are processes for addressing that, and if you ignore those (or in trump's case try them but perform terribly and don't prevail), you don't have a right to lie and manipulate other processes.

This is a fundamental way modern governance works. The process prevents conflict by giving both individuals and the state a - usually fair - 'final authority' to appeal to, instead of using violence, coercion, or deception. Even if it's sometimes wrong, it's better to have a single source of truth to prevent conflict - whether that's individual conflict over who owns what or who deserves what, or political conflict over who has power. It's known who wins and how that's decided, according to the process and the court, the monopoly on violence enforces it, so nobody bothers to even fight. If you're wrongfully convicted, your supporters don't suicide bomb the cops/accusers and start a blood feud, they collect evidence and appeal. If someone screws you on a deal, you sue based on the contract both parties signed. If you lose an election and are upset, you file a lawsuit.

It could be argued this is a fundamental pillar holding up modern life. I'm not entirely sure - certainly a neoreactionary government would have less of this at the top-level, but that isn't ours. And if the election wasn't stolen (and I'm very unconvinced by arguments that it was), then Trump's actions is not good for democracy.

Maybe you're right. But there are processes for addressing that, and if you ignore those (or in trump's case try them but perform terribly and don't prevail), you don't have a right to lie and manipulate other processes.

This is a fundamental way modern governance works. The process prevents conflict by giving both individuals and the state a - usually fair - 'final authority' to appeal to, instead of using violence, coercion, or deception.

This is exactly what the neoreactionary critique gets at, though. In this scenario, the process is your king; your final authority. And because those processes are carried out by people, ultimately those people are your kings.

In short, this way of thinking creates and sustains an oligarchic form of government. Don’t like the process? Don’t like who runs it? Then appeal. By what means? A process. Who runs that process? You’ve already guessed.

Honestly, I agree with you that this is probably the best way of doing things a lot of the time, as opposed to direct personal power or mob democracy. But this flaw is inherent and IMO when the bureaucracy gets too powerful and too uniform then this form of government starts to curdle.

Who runs that process? You’ve already guessed.

You're allowed to change the people who run the process.

(How? By a process...)

But still. You can indeed change the people in charge and they can indeed change the processes of government. Even if in theory you can get into a closed loop where the people in power use their power to stay in power, that is not currently the case in reality. Although Trump did give it the old college try.

You can indeed change the people in charge and they can indeed change the processes of government.

I thought that's what we voted on in 2016, but instead the people in charge of the process didn't play fair, and instead hamstrung the duly elected executive at every opportunity. The uniparty did not play fair.

Instead the 2016 election remains Trump's greatest crime. He defied the uniparty and must be punished for doing so. I have yet to see anything that contradicts this interpretation, and so it remains the lens through which I view these developments.

Might there be other explanations for Trump's failure than the forces of Mordor using dark plots to defeat our lone hero? Maybe Trump was an ineffective executive with a lot more bluster than execution, who was too stubborn to not commit crimes that didn't benefit him at all?

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Even if in theory you can get into a closed loop where the people in power use their power to stay in power, that is not currently the case in reality.

Yes it is. The deep state is in power and will forever be in power unless someone can fire 3/4 of the federal government which is impossible due to lawfare. The bureaucracy is a self-sustaining cancer at this point.

Even if in theory you can get into a closed loop where the people in power use their power to stay in power, that is not currently the case in reality.

That’s exactly the point under discussion, no? The allegation from trump’s side is that this has already happened, and that following standard procedure for resolving disputed elections is therefore meaningless because the entire bureaucracy is controlled by the enemy.

Personally, though, I was thinking of the Civil Service, who I very definitely can’t vote out of office. From where I’m standing Britain has been in that closed loop for at least 20 years now.

I assure you that politicians very much do have the power to shut down departments, fire civil servants, etc. And if none of the options on your ballot paper are promising to do that, you can stand for election yourself.

The obstacle you face is not that the civil service is all-powerful. It's that your fellow citizens disagree with you.

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If Trump thinks the election has been stolen, then the electors aren't fake (from Trump's point of view, obviously).

I don't believe this is true. Even if you think fraud has occurred, you can't just appoint electors based on what you think the result would have been. There's a process that has to be followed.

Even if Trump believes that the process has been corrupted, it's still illegal for him to solicit a public official to subvert the process.

By analogy, let's say I buy a lottery ticket but then someone steals it from me. The lottery gets drawn, and I am convinced I had the winning numbers. The lottery won't pay me out based on my insistence that I would have had the winning numbers if they hadn't been stolen. I am not then allowed to rob the lottery office to rectify the theft I suffered - even if I am correct that I had the numbers.

Now, perhaps I am misunderstanding the law in some important way here - I am not a lawyer, and much less a Georgia lawyer. But my understanding here is that the effort to solicit a public official in a plan to appoint electors who could not be lawfully appointed is straightforwardly illegal.

The electors aren't fake either way. They are proposed alternative electors, which is how past elector disputes have been done. There was never any conspiracy to present them as the primary electors.

The irregular Georgia electors submitted a "Certificate of Vote" to Pence's office where they claimed to be the primary electors, as did the irregular electors in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada. The irregular electors in Michigan are being prosecuted locally for falsifying an official document. It looks like most of the irregular electors in Georgia have rolled and are going to testify against Trump.

The irregular electors in New Mexico and Pennsylvania worded their certificates to be contingent on their later being determined to be the real electors, which keeps them out of legal trouble, but means the certificates are less useful for the Eastman/Chesebro scheme to have Pence overturn the election on Jan 6th.

worded their certificates to be contingent

Aha! The whole time I was writing about the Georgia charges, I was thinking “this wouldn’t have been a criminal charge if they’d covered their asses better.” It’s good to know some of the other groups agreed.

I don't believe this is true. Even if you think fraud has occurred, you can't just appoint electors based on what you think the result would have been. There's a process that has to be followed.

Others disagree -- there was an arguably legal path to this, and it has happened in the past. Obviously much depends on the particulars, but criminalizing the advancement of legal theories which may or may not apply in a given case seems like a bad idea. (not to mention conflicting pretty badly with the first amendment)

I am not then allowed to rob the lottery office to rectify the theft I suffered - even if I am correct that I had the numbers.

But you are allowed to write a letter to the head of the state lotto suggesting that they should give you the money -- you can even go to the press and say that's what they should do!

But my understanding here is that the effort to solicit a public official in a plan to appoint electors who could not be lawfully appointed is straightforwardly illegal.

If this is true, then everyone who issued tweets encouraging faithless electors in 2016 is also straightforwardly guilty.

If this is true, then everyone who issued tweets encouraging faithless electors in 2016 is also straightforwardly guilty.

Do members of the electoral college swear an oath of office to uphold the constitution? Does Georgia have a law requiring electors to cast their votes according to the election results? These are serious questions, I sincerely don't know.

If they do, and a person called an elector from Georgia and asked them to violate the law by being a faithless elector, then yes it does appear that such a person would be straightforwardly guilty.

Biden swore to uphold the Constitution, but created the "Covid" eviction moratorium, which was unconstitutional. If he asks someone to violate the law by preventing a landlord from getting rid of a tenant, is he straightforwardly guilty?

Under OCGA 16-4-7? I wouldn't think so, no. I don't believe that a landlord failing to evict a tenant would constitute a felony.

Was there some other statute you were thinking of? If so you'll need to point me to it.

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Do members of the electoral college swear an oath of office to uphold the constitution?

No - among other places, this is discussed in Baude essay on Section 3, because it creates an interesting lacuna (a presidential elector who engages in an insurrection is not disqualified from future office, but an oath-taking officer who engages in an insurrection is disqualified from being a presidential elector).

Does Georgia have a law requiring electors to cast their votes according to the election results? These are serious questions, I sincerely don't know.

No - see here (although that is the status now, not as of 2020). According to that map, the only states where being a faithless elector is a crime (and thus the only ones where secondary liability for advocating a crime could conceivably trigger) are both Carolinas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. The more normal approach is to declare the faithless elector's vote void and to allow the other electors for that state to replace them.

In addition, a rando tweeting into the aether would be protected by the 1st amendment in a way that a high government official making a personal phone call to an individual elector backed up by detailed (false) arguments of why the election was fraudulent and vague threats of criminal prosecution for covering up the fraud would not be - the law distinguishes between non-serious and serious crime-encouraging speech.

Thank you!

I find it a bit bemusing when people pose these questions with the implication that if someone in a somewhat-similar-but-somewhat-different situation wasn't charged with the same crime, there must be some kind of corruption or double standard. Most the time it's just that details are different and details matter.

Not sure whether things were much different in 2016, but I do seem to recall some electors not from any of those states being penalized -- it's irrelevant though.

Regardless of which states attach penalties, electors in most (all?) states do in fact swear an oath to vote according to the results in their state -- the debatable part would be whether they can be considered "public officials" -- which I'd argue against, but "parts of this indictment are based on debatable legal theories" does not seem to be holding anybody up in this business!

Anyways, if you acknowledge that certain states would consider faithless electorism to be some kind of crime, even one would be enough -- this was very much a nationwide, organized, and well funded advocacy exercise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election#Public_outreach_to_electors

A conspiracy, if you will! So while random twitterati might squeak by on whatever's left of the 1A, I think your assertion that (say) The Hamilton Electors would be in a different position here than Trump and his cohorts is unsupported.

(I'd say it's actually somewhat worse in that their justification was not "We think Trump committed fraud" but rather "We don't like Trump and want to subvert the will of the voters", and also that they actually succeeded in flipping some electors! At least a few were fined as I recall.)

On the tweeting for faithless electors that gets a lot of Logan Act vibes. Where if that was a crime then everyone is guilty whoever once tweeted about geopolitics

While I don’t know that the “oath of office” stuff holds up, I did listen to the Raffensperger call back in the day. Commentary here. For anyone else who wants to read the transcript, it’s here.

Trump was making his preferred outcome very clear. If there was fraud, the President of the United States would be happy. If there wasn’t, he would be unhappy, and some people might face criminal charges.

You can see how this is truth-agnostic. Trump may well have believed it. But he would say the same things whether or not he did. More importantly, he was suggesting what Raffensperger should report, whether or not he did.

Again, I’m not sure that this rises to the intent standard used by OCGA 16-4-7. It is plausibly deniable. I just don’t know how one can read that transcript and come away thinking the guy wanted the truth. He wanted to win.

I just don’t know how one can read that transcript and come away thinking the guy wanted the truth. He wanted to win.

And I don't know how one can read it and come away with the idea that he didn't think there'd been massive fraud -- at least 90% of the call is him railing on about various instances of fraudulent balloting he claims his team had uncovered, and pushing the Georgia officials for data that they were holding back so that he could prove more that he was sure existed but couldn't prove. I'm not sure what evidence you are using to claim that he would have made these claims regardless -- it seems unfalsifiable. New Hampshire and Maine had similar percent margins (and fewer absolute votes) for Biden as compared to Wisconsin -- why didn't Trump try to flip those states too, if he was making allegations unrelated to whatever evidence of fraud that he thought he had?

Anyways my point is that I don't see how anyone can think that this is open-and-shut in anything but Trump's favour -- we are now talking about serious criminal indictments, and this tape surely raises at least a reasonable doubt in terms of mens rea? He lays out all kinds of specific stuff that he (claims to) believe to be true evidence of fraud.

If anything, the Raffensberger call seems like decent evidence for the defense on the Smith (I think? I may be confused now that there are so many) indictment -- it's hard to listen to the guy and believe that he is lying about his beliefs as to whether there was fraud in Georgia (and elsewhere, bleeding into the call). He sounds quite emotional at times.

I do wonder if Stacey Abrams consent decree could fit into this rubric somehow.

Don't forget the Raffensberger call was a settlement conference between attorneys and clients and its disclosure itself is illegal and should have resulted in sanction. It was leaked only in part in order to give the media the chaff to craft this entire narrative. Listening to the entire call makes it clear what was going on, especially given the context of this being a settlement conference protected by the requirement of confidentiality!

They used the settlement conference as a trap in order to get some Trump soundbites which they could leak and then they and the media could knowingly lie about to craft this entire setup.

Interesting, I did not know this! Thanks.

Why do these things keep occurring during election years by the Dems and whose orchestrating the conspiracy?

2016 - Spy on Trump campaign. Russian plot.
2020 - BLM. Everyone is racists vote Biden. Plus nationwide mail-in ballots. And a massive plot by the media to deny any narrative in unison that would help Trump 2024 - Charge Trump everywhere lawfare. Create law or come up with novel legal theories to make it happen

Or in Movie Terms Trump: The Russian Agent “Save America from installing Putin in office” Trump 2: The White Supremacists “Save America from Racism” Trump 3: He’s Literally a Criminal

I wonder if some red state can whip up some Rico Charges on Kamela for bailing out BLM protestors. She was bailing out and promoting the cause which was to get her elected while knowing the underlines were committing violence. Maybe everyone in 2024 can have charges pending.

Biden might be going to get charged for something hunter Biden related.

Give me odds you actually think that and I might take you up on them.

How much do you really believe?

Plus nationwide mail-in ballots.

Yeah, those evil Democrats making mail-in ballots allowed for all in Arkansas, Montana, Utah, Kentucky, Florida, Missouri, West Virginia, Oklahoma...

Since it is in fact not an election year, I suspect that one answer to your question is that about 40-50% of America's time is now considered to be "election year" in some sense.

Honestly, your political season is exhausting.

I listen to talk radio and conservative hosts are exhausted by American election cycles and preemptively burned out by the upcoming election.

On at least some of the charges, it would appear that he's deeply screwed. E.g. "Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer" seems to be open and shut, and carries a minimum 1 year sentence

I guess you're easily impressed? Complaining that politicians are violating their oaths of office is one of the most common attacks in the books. There probably isnt a single prominent politician of whom it hasn't been said. This is why we're destroying norms and legitimacy? Ok then, let's see how this shakes out on a 20-year timescale.

Also you didn't mention that these charges were posted on the internet before the Grand Jury had even voted on them, which sort of makes a mockery of the whole pretense.

Anyways, if it's a crime to ask officials to do something that is later determined to violate their oath of office, everyone is a criminal.

What I find infuriating about this discussion is how often the term "fake electors" is used. If the electors were "fake" and the electors commited "fraud", can anyone provide me with a count of how many of the fake electors' votes were mistakenly recorded in the Senate? Oh, none? Amazing! Well, what kind of detective work went into distinguishing the fake votes from the real votes? Was the Secret Service called in for their expertise in detecting counterfeit money?

Obviously the accurate term should be "contingent electors", in the sense that these would have been the correct electors if Trump prevailed in his various lawsuits. It's easy to imagine that in the case where he was able to establish fraud and the court determined that he had won the election, they wouldn't want the process to get held up by the need to quickly get some electors together to cast their votes and mail them to Washington, DC. The Georgia "fake slate" is dated December 14, so there would not have been much time to get these votes recorded if they had had to wait for all litigation to be resolved.

There's such egregious question-begging going on by calling them "fake electors", it makes me crazy how little pushback I have seen regarding this term.

Obviously the accurate term should be "contingent electors", in the sense that these would have been the correct electors if Trump prevailed in his various lawsuits.

If Trump had won his lawsuits with decisive implications for the election, his slate of electors still had to be appointed by the state legislature. In the absence of that, they're not contingent electors, they're nobody. The only contingency is whether or not he won, which he didn't. In Michigan, for example, the fake electors gathered and selected themselves after all the lawsuits had been resolved (not to Trump's favor, needless to say). They subsequently represented themselves to Congress as the true electors from Michigan despite not being appointed by the legislature. That Congress wasn't fooled doesn't make it less a crime, any more than my attempts to shoot you don't cease to be a crime because my gun jams (nor is my sincere belief that murdering you is justified and legal a defense).

This isn’t an apt analogy because the gun not firing was a mechanical issue and you really did try to kill them.

I don’t think anyone believes sending in a bunch of Trump electors would have worked but well got lost in the mail.

Attempted crimes should be punished, but the details of why the "attempt" failed are relevant to determining whether it was a genuine attempt at all. In your attempted murder analogy, yes, you couldn't shoot me because your gun jammed, but if prior to that attempt you purposely manipulated the gun by jamming up the chamber so that a spent round would get stuck in there and be impossible to eject, that would be evidence that you never intended your "murder attempt" to be effective.

The fact that Congress wasn't fooled doesn't by itself make election fraud not a crime, but the fact that apparently Trump tried this maneuver in several states and in no cases were the "fake elector" votes counted, indicates that there is something suspicious about the narrative that he was trying to deceive Congress. Yes, they sent a piece of paper to Congress saying they were the duly-chosen electors and they were voting for Trump etc., but that paper was presented as what it was, an alternate slate of electors. At no point was Pence saying, "well, now I have no idea which ones are the real votes!"

Ineptitude is not a defense.

the fact that apparently Trump tried this maneuver in several states and in no cases were the "fake elector" votes counted, indicates that there is something suspicious about the narrative that he was trying to deceive Congress.

That his deceit attempts were transparently absurd?

the Secret Service

Are they…usually called in for elections? I don’t anything about involving them in Bush v. Gore. How exactly do the fraud claims relate to counterfeit money?

This sounds like special pleading.

As is insisting that the violation was justified because it wouldn’t have inconvenienced the poor, suffering bureaucracy. Such policies are tolerated if and only if they make a nice fig leaf.

My question about the Secret Service was an ironic reference to the idea that if the pieces of paper from these "fake electors" were a big problem when it came time to count the votes, presumably because said papers are difficult to distinguish from the votes cast by "authentic electors," then maybe they would have to call in the Secret Service, who are in charge of prosecuting cases of counterfeiting money and therefore experts in document authentication, to help sort things out.

It's the same with the phrase "Overturning the election". When the media declared Biden the winner, the election was over, apparently, so all of Trump's efforts to contest the election get called "overturning the election". They can never concede that Trump genuinely believed himself wronged, that filing lawsuits and contesting results is normal. So Trump never "contested" the election, he always "attempted to overturn" it.

Coverage around the election was better at first. Even NBC.

By December, when the legal battles are falling apart, it starts to be called overturning. Possibly because of the “safe haven” limit, December 8th, and of course the actual certification on the 14th. Some outlets were sticki by with “contest,” though. Then the Capitol riots really turn media opinion.

can anyone provide me with a count of how many of the fake electors' votes were mistakenly recorded in the Senate?

I think the idea is that they were in a conspiracy to commit fraud, one is still guilty even if one fails. But more importantly, the fraud laws I have seen always require deception. In what way were these "fake" electors trying to deceive anyone?

The Georgia indictment includes a charge of Conspiracy to Defraud the State, but it doesn't directly relate to the false elector scheme. It relates to the plan to steal voter data.

Deception is not an element of the relevant offence, found in OCGA 16-10-21:

A person commits the offense of conspiracy to defraud the state when he conspires or agrees with another to commit theft of any property which belongs to the state or to any agency thereof or which is under the control or possession of a state officer or employee in his official capacity. The crime shall be complete when the conspiracy or agreement is effected and an overt act in furtherance thereof has been committed, regardless of whether the theft is consummated. A person convicted of the offense of conspiracy to defraud the state shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.

You're probably thinking of last week's indictment. That does have fraud charges relating to the false elector scheme. I don't think deception is an element of those offences either, but I haven't gone back to check.

I can't imagine a definition of fraud that wouldn't involve some kind of deception. Merriam-Webster:

1a : DECEIT, TRICKERY

specifically : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right

I literally just quoted a legal definition that does not include deceit. If you can't imagine it after having it placed right in front of your eyes, that's a truly profound failure of imagination.

Technically I said fraud not defraud, so that makes me the best kind of correct. Here is the relevant Georgia law, since you are a big fan.

That said, as humorous as you are, you are still wrong. What do you think is involved in the theft? Let's use our imaginations and imagine that Donald Trump says to the official who controls election data, "hey, it's me, Donald Trump, your favorite president. Way better than Carter, obviously. Anyway, I suspect there was fraud in your state, so I need access to your voter data, please send it to me by December 1st." If the official then sends Trump the election data, do you think he would be guilty of theft?

I'm going to skip the part where you answer. The only way Trump and his allies "defrauded the state" in the case at hand is if they falsely claimed that they had the right to voter data.

Technically I said fraud not defraud, so that makes me the best kind of correct. Here is the relevant Georgia law, since you are a big fan.

How is that law in any way relevant? Neither Trump nor his co-conspirators have been charged with it.

I'm going to skip the part where you answer. The only way Trump and his allies "defrauded the state" in the case at hand is if they falsely claimed that they had the right to voter data.

I am once again begging you to read the actual statute.

They are guilty of conspiracy to defraud the state if they agree to steal something and commit an overt act in the furtherance of the conspiracy. It's got nothing to do with what they claim or don't claim.

The first person to use the word fraud (without de-) was you. You stated that you didn’t think deception was an element. I commented that fraud would seem to always involve deception. That’s why it’s relevant.

I’ll ask you once again to consider the method by which Trump stole the relevant voter data. It involved lying. A lot. Do you think Trump would have been charged with theft if his claims about the election had been true? The indictment sure makes it seem like the fact he was lying is relevant.

Also, stepping back for a second, there are so many counts in the indictment related to forgery, false documents, and false statements, I don’t know how you managed to start a debate over the one count that (arguably, in your opinion) doesn’t involve deception.

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I guess if they tried to hack the polls or something.

How are they not fake? Article II Section 1 Clause 2 of the US Constitution:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

Now let’s see the manner the Georgia Legislature has directed electors be appointed. Georgia Code Title 21. Elections § 21-2-499. I won’t quote it here, but the Georgia Secretary of State counts the votes, and the governor certifies the electors for the candidate who got the most votes. The governor certified Joe Biden’s electors on November 20th.

When the Trump electors got together on December 14 and stated, “WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, being the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Georgia, do hereby certify the following:” they LIED. They were not the duly elected and qualified electors. It was public knowledge that the duly elected and qualified electors had been chosen on November 20. Despite this, they mailed the “certification” to the US Government. They also identified the “certification” as being mailed per 3 USC 11, which pertains specifically to presidential elector certificates.

I’m really at a loss here. Do you have some metaphysical objection to the entire concept of “fake electors”? If Donald Trump personally spent the entire early voting period in Georgia driving around to various polling locations and voting in the name of dead people still on the rolls would you concede that he committed fraud to steal the election, or would you say he was just using all of his options to contest what he sees as an unfair process?

the Georgia Secretary of State counts the votes, and the governor certifies the electors for the candidate who got the most votes. The governor certified Joe Biden’s electors on November 20th.

Interesting that these people didn't commit a crime for certifying an election when the number of illegally cast votes was known to exceed the margin of victory.

they LIED. They were not the duly elected and qualified electors. It was public knowledge that the duly elected and qualified electors had been chosen on November 20.

You understand that lying involves more than just uttering a false statement, right? Merriam Webster says: "to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive". No intent to deceive, therefore not a lie. As to your question "How are they not fake?" Same answer. No intent to deceive.

I think lying is probably the wrong word, as is fake. The people signing this document as far as I can tell we’re, at worst, an alternative slate of electors choosing to take this action because they believe the Georgia election was fraudulent in a way that falsely handed the win to Biden. The reason I object to the terms “lying” and “fake”, is that they assume the conclusion— they assume there was no fraud and thus anyone doing anything on the assumption of that fraud is lying. Keep in mind, Trumps claims never got any sort of hearing, most being summarily dismissed on standings issues. In other words, these guys are trying to rectify a situation where they believe the wrong results were certified and thus it might be dishonest, but I don’t see it as fake and they aren’t necessarily lying.

Isn't a really trivial analogy here a sovereign citizen making a false statement to a court about some procedural matter that he believes to be true due to his tortured interpretations of the law but is, as a matter of words and objets as the court would understand, false? Like (meh example) claiming they're a law enforcement officer when they aren't because they were deputized by themselves as a citizen or something.

I think they are lying because even if there was fraud - which there wasn't - that still wouldn't make them the 'duly elected and qualified' electors, because the process for choosing those is clearly set out and they did not satisfy it. They weren't just saying we ought to be the electors, which would be fine and expected from someone who believed there was fraud, but that they were the electors, which is simply false from any perspective - or at least that's how I understand it.

Just going to post the usual "it's never rico" article here https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit/

As far as I can tell, unless the defendant is literally the mafia, rico charges always get laughed out of court. Seems like these are the weakest of all the Trumped up charges so far.

The article, entertaining though it is, appears to be aimed at dumb civil plaintiffs. A DA bringing criminal charges, one would hope, would exhibit a higher level of sophistication.

This DA in particular appears to have a history of bringing successful RICO charges, including against non-mafia targets.

Georgia's RICO law is supposedly also broader than its federal equivalent, though I'm not going to pretend I understand the differences.

Sorry to come back to this comment but I just saw this video and had to share it.

As Ken noted a day ago, this is georgia RICO, and his claim is scoped to federal RICO! It's a great article though.

Oh, that’s a surprise.

On page 9, the grand jury list, three names are struck out by pen. Anyone know what that means?

Hannania, Iowa State Fair, and Vivek. Vivek’s response to LGBTQ made the rounds on twitter mostly with positive support on how it can be handled.

https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1690890371398836224?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

Vivek says a lot of words but if I had to summarize it’s basically libertarianism for adults - you can do what you want - but no pride for kids and restrictions on female sports and bathroom usage.

I use to share these type of opinions and perhaps I still do. But I no longer find these as stable positions. It comes down to well why don’t you want pride in schools? It’s because I believe in social contagion (and the broad right) that pride is bad and I don’t want the next generation of children to be more gay and transexual. Basically I don’t want grooming for those lifestyles. I think the left knows this. And won’t settle for the right thinking pride is bad. And then it’s well your a homophobe/transphobe. Masks off yea I am. That is why I don’t want pride in school because I think it’s bad for people.

Of course I think the same problem exists with Hannania’s new position on race. Treat everyone the same. Be tough on crime. Do I think being colorblind will be accepted by the left when it ends up with whites always on top and blacks on the bottom with a lot of black men in prison? No.

I feel like we have discussed these issues a lot. Even a mod thru in a post on why can’t we just be colorblind (perhaps bad summary from memory). I think it’s interesting seeing the third leading GOP candidate making similar arguments. And in all honesty my guess is Vivek’s position is likely the preferred position of mosts on the Motte. None of the pride everywhere but adults can do as they please. The race issues I think perhaps we could get back to the old equilibrium of ignoring disparate outcomes and just treating blacks as if they are white. But I doubt it. The Pride issues I think are harder because not wanting children exposed more directly says we think it’s bad and don’t want our children taught this stuff. The positions I’m laying out are likely the preferred position of most of the GOP establishment. I think Desantis would even accept these positions if offered. I don’t expect the left to offer these compromises because they are true believers that disparate outcomes are proof of racism or because a lot of supporters find the moral superiority of getting to call red tribe “your a racists/transphobe” etc enjoyable so no reason to stop.

While I think these positions are unstable I’m not sure the right could move the country to the stable positions. Which would be widespread knowledge that a great deal of disparate outcome is from hbd and on pride matters getting the country to agree that lgbtq lifestyles are not desirable (which was the world pre-2008). As it is the current positions seem unstable to me and easily attacked by the left and to a great extent makes the right look like hypocrites afraid to say the quiet part out loud.

Also, might be a good place for anyone to posts anything they found interesting at the Iowa State Fair.

Libertarianism for adults. I.e. Your rights end where my feelings begin, but for vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives.

In a moment of clarity, I would hope everyone who is libertarian minded can recognize that the guy stripping naked at the LNC or the guys ferociously arguing against drivers licenses are much better freedom fighters than you are insofar as you oppose 'protecting trans kids' and helping children learn about gender and sexuality beyond a stilted binary.

The most salient argument against libertarianism remains libertarians being faced with what people who are not vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives do with their freedom.

But this is a song and dance that has been done before. Hans Herman Hoppe laid down the law on this stuff years ago. Insofar as libertarians want to live in nice societies (they do) the only functional tool against the kind of people who destroy nice societies is physical punishment. You quickly stop being a libertarian in a universalist sense and turn into a Civic Nationalist.

My question for libertarian or libertarian leaning people would be, why bother with this song and dance? Why ground your arguments in some abstract first principles relating to freedom and whatever else when you truly do not want freedom for everyone to do what they please? Why not just say the things you want society to be and stand on those grounds?

I mean, just imagine the genuinely impressive amount of energy and work libertarians managed to pool together in the past decades being spent on pushing an image of a society libertarians actually want to live in. Instead they work to lay the groundwork for the individual freedom enjoyed by convicted sex offenders dressing in drag and reading to 5 year olds.

insofar as you oppose 'protecting trans kids' and helping children learn about gender and sexuality beyond a stilted binary.

This framing is of course directly bullshit, and it’s not adults going and being wrong on their lonesome. At least the ancient aliens guys don’t demand their particular brand of lunacy be incorporated in public school curricula, donchaknow.

And speaking of public schools, there’s no intrinsic reason, from a libertarian perspective, to prioritize their expertise on convincing your kid to be not-cis over the parent’s rights.

speaking of public schools, there’s no intrinsic reason, from a libertarian perspective, to prioritize their expertise on convincing your kid to be not-cis over the parent’s rights.

From a libertarian perspective, why does the State get to teach kids anyways?

Libertarians haven't really achieved anything, though, exactly because of this fundamental inconsistency. In practice, "libertarianism" is just reagan-conservatism without some aspects of late-20th-century christian morality and with more of an emphasis on classically liberal economic policy.

Libertarians haven't really achieved anything

Depends on which scale you focus on.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230615123743/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/us/politics/nh-free-state-project.html/

you oppose 'protecting trans kids'

So what does that mean, exactly? Because the people I see talking about that seem to mean "persuading twelve year olds to go on puberty blockers because they'll never be able to pass if they wait too long to transition, also cut off your [gender applicable bits] the second it's legal to do so".

Anything about "hey maybe this ten year old is not trans but is just confused and anxious about puberty?" is met with "that's transphobia, that's trans genocide, PROTECT TRANS KIDS".

So yeah, I remain to be convinced this means anything in practice other than "Notice how wonderful I am as an ally".

As vapid as I find libertarianism to be, "vaping white heterosexual men with Asian wives" is just ridiculous characterisation. How about I characterise "protect trans kids is a figleaf for groomers and predators to influence vulnerable young people into keeping secrets from their parents, a classic tactic of abusers", is that a fair go do you think?

It's just a way to twist the knife of liberty a bit. From a Libertarian perspective you could not even begin to ask me this question. I don't owe anyone an explanation of what I mean by it. I just say it.

True libertarians have been a footnote in Western politics for decades now (with most incarnations even claiming the label being really somewhere along the lines of being for less economic regulation than any more mainstream group and being largely indifferent about social liberties but recognising that sometimes pretending to care - "I hear you can't get enough votes for your preferred latest surveillance bill, are you sure we can't discuss some tax breaks?" style - can spook mainstream parties into supporting economic deregulation), but it does strike me as strange that you would choose to label the core Trumpian stuff as "libertarian" when it's pretty much approaching the polar opposite (increasingly economically authoritarian now that big business is firmly Blue, and socially authoritarian in a way that only sometimes seems not so because they are up against a different group of social authoritarians and on the margin fighting against any authoritarian ruler looks like fighting for freedom). Is it just because you see continuity between edgy outgroup youths claiming to be libertarian 15 years ago and edgy outgroup youths being alt-right now?

My reading of American "libertarianism" is that apart from the small true libertarian core a lot of people describing themselves as "libertarian" were just right-wing (vaguely or strongly), but didn't share what used to be one of the most crucial components of American right-wing thought - religiousness. Since Trumpism and other nationalist/populist movements and general secularization have created more alternatives to be right-wing and not religious, former libertarians gravitate to those movements, and would probably feel them to be in some way equivalent to their own libertarianism, even if they can't necessarily fully articulate how.

I’ve always thought libertarian in practice = conservatives wanted to brand away from conservatives And things like rationalist = democrats trying to not brand as democrats

My personal and most likely extremely uncharitable take was that libertarians were simply people who are aware at some basic level that the government is hostile to their interests and the interests of people who are prone to believing in libertarian ideals more generally - but they're unable to articulate this due to the complicated and arcane ways in which power is both wielded against them and used to prevent them from voicing their objections. Their opposition to government power is based on that dim understanding that government is hostile to them, and so they want to reduce the ability of the government to harm them further by simply weakening it.

A lot of self-identified "libertarians" from the Ron Paul (appropriate enough given that I'd describe Paul as more an anti-federalist than a libertarian, even though he ran on the LP's ticket once) era were just disaffected paleocons (think Pat Buchanan) who'd lost the power struggle with neoconservatives in the 90s. Trump rolled in an more or less ran on a Buchanan style platform and ran away with that group.

As an American libertarian, absolutely not. I hate the rise of trumpism because it's opposed to my principles in many ways

As I implicated, I'm not talking about all the libertarians, certainly not the actually consistent ones, but folks who at one time saw fit to call themselves "libertarian" despite not actually being such, at least in an ideologically coherent way, and now might or might not do so.

"Libertarian" is not trademarked. Anyone can use the term. I consider myself libertarian, and many other people would agree I fit the common conception of that term. But I'm not gonna defend anyone and everyone that uses it for themselves.

You also seem to have some personal beef with "vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives". I'd suggest dropping it. This is not the kind of discussion forum for your personal grievances.

I was attempting to write up a longer post, but I'm tired and sick so it was turning into low quality crap writing. So I'm just gonna do short responses to your questions.

But this is a song and dance that has been done before. Hans Herman Hoppe laid down the law on this stuff years ago. Insofar as libertarians want to live in nice societies (they do) the only functional tool against the kind of people who destroy nice societies is physical punishment. You quickly stop being a libertarian in a universalist sense and turn into a Civic Nationalist. My question for libertarian or libertarian leaning people would be, why bother with this song and dance?

Libertarians have set out the rules pretty clearly. Property is a thing. Property implies ultimate ownership. You and only you can have ownership of your body and person. That ownership can be expanded to physical objects. The rules of how that ownership can be expanded do not have to be set in stone, or handed down by the gods of libertarianism. Violations of property are considered initiations of violence and will likely be met with violence. Libertarians have never expressed a full story of non-violence. So there has never been a contradiction with libertarians using physical violence against thieves, rapists, and murderers.

Why ground your arguments in some abstract first principles relating to freedom and whatever else when you truly do not want freedom for everyone to do what they please?

Some of us are true believers. I want you to do whatever you want. Just don't violate me or mine.

Asking for the golden rule treatment is apparently a horrible thing for libertarians to do. "Well yes, you can want to have your freedom to live in peace and not have your stuff stolen, but I also want my freedom to enact endless social problems with wealth I don't have, so I need you to pay taxes first, oh and go along with my social programs when I want".

Why not just say the things you want society to be and stand on those grounds?

Because I don't think everyone else has to live in the same society as me. I'm hoping they can live in the society they want. So how would my vision of a good society convince anyone? The idea of imposing your vision of society on others is a fundamentally statist way of looking at things. For example, I don't want to live in Amish society, but I support their right to exist. When the government tries to say "no Amish, you must do X" my thought is to push back against those government intrusions. If you ask me to defend Amish society, I'm gonna shuffle my feet and say 'well they want to live that way, so let them, yeah I agree it looks boring as hell and more than a little silly'.

The issue is the real world has commons. Things like providing schools which I believe almost every libertarian thinks a smart poor kid should be provided with an education.

There isn’t a strong libertarian argument against open borders. Which would then make Democracy incompatible with unlimited immigration. The voter base would change and you would be voted out. So I guess you need a dictator to maintain your politics.

Or say a community of libertarians have good well supported and agreed to schools. The current way to keep the poors out is to ban property density. But that isn’t very libertarian. If you let people do whatever they want with their property than one person sells to a developer who builds low-income housing. And the commons you did agree with is suddenly underfunded.

I think libertarian is good within boundaries. But it easily falls apart without something above it enforcing something for the commons.

I feel like I’m a libertarian when I think society is broadly good. But turn a bit fascists when it seems the system is working.

I believe almost every libertarian thinks a smart poor kid should be provided with an education.

There are methods of obtaining education that do not depend on property taxes. For example, income-based repayment income-share agreements (selling a share of all your future earnings to the school [note: link changed]) presumably could be extended all the way down to kindergarten.

That link says "sure there are problems with it, this is a book after all so it has to show problems, but it could work out" without stating how to solve the problems.

Better link

An income-share agreement (or ISA) is a financial structure in which an individual or organization provides something of value (often a fixed amount of money) to a recipient who, in exchange, agrees to pay back a percentage of his income for a fixed number of years.

Kindergarteners can't meaningfully agree to give up their future earnings

A parent is the trustee/owner of his child. Therefore, he is empowered to sell to the kindergarten a share of that trusteeship/ownership.

In the unlikely event that the child disavows the contract with the kindergarten when the trusteeship is terminated (whether at adulthood or at some earlier date), the parent is obligated by the same contract to repay to the kindergarten the lost expected value of the child's future earnings.

More comments

Kindergarten isn't education. It's a daycare service.

Schooling is a service. It needs payment. Private schooling is way more efficient already, and the funds gained from cutting education taxes would certainly provide more of a service for the average "poor" family.

Can't afford an education as it stands but know that it will help you monetarily long-term? Take out a loan. The current issues of student-loan stem from the governments mismanagement of state-assigned loans, which were in of themselves a mistake.

That's not convincing. It doesn't even cover the most obvious flaw, which is that procedures that are no problem for corporations are big problems for individuals because they don't scale down; a corporation can afford having a corporate lawyer on call, while just the threat of a lawsuit can be ruinous to an individual. A corporation can also go bankrupt; would an individual going bankrupt void the agreement?

It also claims

However, advocates of ISAs contend that since students have no legal obligation to work in a particular industry, and since it is illegal for investors to pressure them into a certain career, students are no more “indentured” than those with a student loan.

But the whole point of the scheme the way it's presented in the first link is that investors can make you act in financially beneficial ways. To the extent that that actually alleviates the problem, it also makes the scheme not work at all.

To be clear, I provided the first link only because I couldn't remember what the real-life version was called. I'll remove it now. Just ignore it and focus on the second link.

More comments

The issue is the real world has commons. Things like providing schools which I believe almost every libertarian thinks a smart poor kid should be provided with an education.

  1. School is not the commons. Schooling is a private good, and will obtain optimal distribution on its own.
  2. No I don't think that. Or the closest I get to thinking that is 'it would be nice, but in a world without infinite resources no need to force it'.
  3. Since I wouldn't force it, I'd like to be in a society rich enough to engage in charity for those cases, but its not a deal breaker. There could easily be other things that matter more.

There isn’t a strong libertarian argument against open borders. Which would then make Democracy incompatible with unlimited immigration. The voter base would change and you would be voted out. So I guess you need a dictator to maintain your politics.

Democracy isn't compatible with libertarianism in the first place, so there is no need to preserve it. If there was a form of democracy that was a fit with libertarianism, it would probably look closer to corporate shareholder voting.

Or say a community of libertarians have good well supported and agreed to schools. The current way to keep the poors out is to ban property density. But that isn’t very libertarian. If you let people do whatever they want with their property than one person sells to a developer who builds low-income housing. And the commons you did agree with is suddenly underfunded. I think libertarian is good within boundaries. But it easily falls apart without something above it enforcing something for the commons.

I didn't realize you were building up to a "trap", I genuinely disagreed with the previous stuff. Land ownership and property ownership agreements would probably happen a lot more often without zoning as a crutch. If there is an actual commons problem there are typically two ways to solve it:

  1. One person/entity is given entire ownership of the commons. They then suffer the destruction of the commons, so have reasons to preserve it.
  2. Complex systems of social governance arise to protect the commons. Elinor Ostrom won an economic nobel prize for her work on this.

One person/entity is given entire ownership of the commons. They then suffer the destruction of the commons, so have reasons to preserve it.

A post about libertarian philosophy was the last place I expected to see an endorsement of feudalism. This proposal is essentially just repainting manorialism.

Is this argument basically "feudalism was bad, thus anything associated with it is also bad"?

It isn't even an argument, just me expressing my surprise that someone claiming to be libertarian would be down with feudalism. "I've got all the liberty I want? Fine, I'm starting a new monarchy with me at the head." is the kind of statement that libertarians I've interacted with have tended to violently reject. I'm honestly not sure you'd even be able to call yourself a libertarian here if you accept that position - you'd just be a monarchist with extra steps.

Have these libertarians never been confronted with how they'd handle the commons? I feel like "have clear property rights" is a very libertarian answer.

And ownership of the commons doesn't require feudalism? That requires at least some explanation rather than a throwaway comment. The textbook example given is usually a lake where multiple farmers/fishers/something are using the lake and also polluting the lake. They can't get to a solution because its not individually beneficial to solve the pollution, but it is beneficial if they all do it.

You don't have to have someone own all the farmers to get to a solution in this scenario, you just have to have someone own the lake.

To clarify I don't have a problem with vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives. It's just a critique of what looks to me to be a blindspot. Similar to how early internet Atheism, looked at as a group of people, started expressing itself as an entity. Sure, they weren't advertised as a group of slightly autistic white teenage boys. But a lot of the expression of the group was dictated heavily by the fact that a lot of them were. Same for Libertarianism. It's mostly just white dudes.

As for Hoppe, his objection did not pertain to murderers and the like. It pertained to people who disrupted social normalcy as seen by those who connect together in a social covenant. If the covenant doesn't like homosexuals, drug users and jews, those could all be physically removed by the covenant and it would be completely Libertarian to do so.

Some of us are true believers. I want you to do whatever you want. Just don't violate me or mine.

I think the meat of the disagreement lies somewhere in the paragraph you wrote here, so let me try teasing something out.

If I set up a Discord server where I sell estrogen to consenting persons whose age I can't exactly verify, and I accept monetary and sexual favors as payment, and enforce a social hierarchy within the Discord server that functionally facilitates predation on people curios about this sort of thing, and I owe my entire existence to people under 15 consuming pornography at a great rate, that's just fine? Like, if your son comes in my discord server, pays me with sexual favors and starts consuming estrogen I sell him, rendering him sterile and depressed, but he also has permanent rectal damage after falling to peer pressure and posting videos of himself inserting large plastic items into his anus, then someone leaks the videos your son put up on the discord server, which was technically public, and your son later kills himself... Did I violate your son?

Because I didn't ask him to join the server. He got that idea from reading comments on a porn site.

As a parent, what was your course of action regarding your son? Given you don't control the internet, and you believe you should not exercise control over the internet to stifle what others can and can't see. Completely ban the internet in your house? That limits your freedom quite a bit. Try to block 'pr0n' and hope there aren't actors who want to guide your son towards watching it past the block?

My point would be that my discord server inherently infringes on your right to exist in a nice and healthy way. You should not have to live like the Amish just to avoid sexual deviants and freaks.

You should not have to live like the Amish just to avoid sexual deviants and freaks.

And you don’t. Fundamentalists mostly live in the same world as everyone else, and they don’t worry about their kids being groomed into being a freak by weirdos.

Huh? They absolutely do worry about this and frequently protest about the idea that this could even start happening. They impose a lot of harsh restrictions on their kids precisely to minimise the chances of them being groomed into freaks by weirdos, and they're not exactly quiet about it. Hell, a lot of opposition to drag queen story hours does in fact come from the fundamentalists.

And you don’t. Fundamentalists mostly live in the same world as everyone else, and they don’t worry about their kids being groomed into being a freak by weirdos.

Fundamentalists definately worry about this. Given how the Trans issue has gone, it seems a lot of other people worry about it as well.

If I set up a Discord server where I sell estrogen to consenting persons whose age I can't exactly verify, and I accept monetary and sexual favors as payment, and enforce a social hierarchy within the Discord server that functionally facilitates predation on people curios about this sort of thing, and I owe my entire existence to people under 15 consuming pornography at a great rate, that's just fine? Like, if your son comes in my discord server, pays me with sexual favors and starts consuming estrogen I sell him, rendering him sterile and depressed, but he also has permanent rectal damage after falling to peer pressure and posting videos of himself inserting large plastic items into his anus, then someone leaks the videos your son put up on the discord server, which was technically public, and your son later kills himself... Did I violate your son?

Because I didn't ask him to join the server. He got that idea from reading comments on a porn site.

As a parent, what was your course of action regarding your son? Given you don't control the internet, and you believe you should not exercise control over the internet to stifle what others can and can't see. Completely ban the internet in your house? That limits your freedom quite a bit. Try to block 'pr0n' and hope there aren't actors who want to guide your son towards watching it past the block?

My point would be that my discord server inherently infringes on your right to exist in a nice and healthy way. You should not have to live like the Amish just to avoid sexual deviants and freaks.

In that scenario I failed my hypothetical son, not you. And if he was 14 or 15 he also failed himself to some extent. As a parent I see my job as to raise functioning adults that can navigate adult society. That means they need some ability to make decisions on their own, assess dangers on their own, and when they fail in minor ways I am to be there as a support structure for them to fall back on.

You made your scenario about sexual deviancy, and something that is on the verge of being illegal. But there are plenty of fully legal and pernicious traps in society that do not involve sexual deviancy. Drinking is a problem, sugar and obesity are problems, there are MLM and pyramid schemes that can suck people in, cults, etc. I cannot burn a path through the world and eliminate every possible danger for my kids. My only option, without engaging in a strange war against modern society, is to give my child the tools to protect themselves.

If all my children become dead and destroyed by this world, then I will wage war. But it won't be because of any high minded principles, I'll just be a broken man bent on revenge.

You also seem to have some personal beef with "vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives". I'd suggest dropping it. This is not the kind of discussion forum for your personal grievances.

I didn't read him as having any beef with them. To summarize what I believe is position is: libertarians usually are people whose personal issues with "square" conservative society are minor and not substantive, and they could easily just negociate for acceptance of them (acceptance of minor risk taking with regards to personal health, acceptance of interracial relationships with ethnic groups that seem mostly compatible) rather than agitate for the destruction of functional societies.

The vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives line just points out how for the most part they're still heterosexual and white. That they don't consider gender/sexual anarchy to be optimal solutions since they don't for the most part use themselves the freedom it gives them, and that they are the kind of white people who move out of neighborhoods at the first signs of diversity-fueled racial unrest. But most of them are very smart, so they often write the best most convincing arguments against conservative norms, which are then picked up by people who do want gender/sexual anarchy and believe homogenous societies are inherently deficient.

Why not just say the things you want society to be and stand on those grounds?

In concurrence with @cjet79, because I don't think my vision of the good is perfect for everyone and I have no desire to compel people that disagree with me to participate. I'll happily lay out what that vision is, I may even try to convince people to participate, but I'm not a universalist. Importantly, I also acknowledge that in addition to not being a universalist, I might be just plain wrong, so one way to hedge against that is applying minimal government force to activities that aren't demonstrably hurting anyone.

My question for libertarian or libertarian leaning people would be, why bother with this song and dance? Why ground your arguments in some abstract first principles relating to freedom and whatever else when you truly do not want freedom for everyone to do what they please? Why not just say the things you want society to be and stand on those grounds?

I started writing a long answer from a libertarian perspective after being triggered by the surface level argument people always make using the stupid ass LP as a stick to beat the long and storied tradition of liberty, but then I figured you wouldn't get it and it'd sound like any and all explanation from the libertarian point of view.

So let me try to answer in a way someone who bit the bullet of Moralism and isn't afraid to just say they want to make society a certain way, would understand.

The problem with just doing what you want, is that you, like all other humans before you, are fucking stupid and will fuck this up. I would too. Anybody given power always does because they're not God. It's just a question of time. Sure you may get a few lucky strokes for a while, get a Caesar or two in there, have a ruling class that is actually well meaning, competent, and lucky for a bit, but it won't last.

Any regime, forever, by the very jealous nature of power, is always crawling towards the worst possible totalitarianism and the inevitable collapse that goes with it. This is just the nature of things, like the seasons, breathing and all other such cycles.

Since living in totalitarian societies is real bad even if you agree with the founding principles not to mention unsustainable, we should try to avoid this. There isn't much that can be done against nature, but lovers of freedom have devised some ways of medicating some of the problem.

Though the growth of Power is a ratchet, you can still slow it down. Fight every battle, make the bastard pay for every millimeter of redtape, every camera in your home, every license and registration. This is the fight you and all other Boromirs of your kind are always perplexed by.

Why make these abstract and complex systems of rights and moral justification to not touch the Ring of Power? Why not just use it against Sauron, then chuck it in Mt. Doom and call it a day? These are all bullshit justifications that aren't real anyways.

Well because we know once you pick it up, you're not putting it down unless you die. So the big complications are supposed to act as a giant neon sign warning saying THIS IS THE DANGEROUS RING OF POWER DO NOT TOUCH. And yeah sure it's annoying and inconvenient, sure it means some evil will be permitted that needn't be, and sure it is no permanent solution. But its less horrible than whatever you'll become if you touch the Ring.

You may say this is all ultimately futile because someone will eventually take it and fuck us all over, you may even say that if you don't pick it up somebody worse might. You're right of course, but it's also the Ring calling to you. Don't listen. Remember that it only obeys its one master. You won't be doing what's right with Power, you'll be doing what's right for Power. And like everybody else with a vision, you and it will be destroyed and replaced with the only thing Power ever does: grow more of itself.

Freedom has only ever existed as an oversight, a crack in the pavement of sovereignty, a "liberty" to be rescinded in the future. It is also vital to all that is human, beautiful and true, and that's why me and my ilk fight for it, and against you and all others who have designs on society despite being fated to lose.

Some dream of chucking the ring in a volcano and designing societies that do not contain coercion. I assume these would better fit your idea of a positive vision. But I've seen too many fail to believe in these Utopian dreams of transcendance. All we can do is fight, right now and right there, against the pull of the abyss.

This would be an extremely salient critique if I wasn't in a thread with Libertarian minded people talking about limiting the liberty of others because they happen to not like and not believe in the thing others are doing with their own liberty.

The LP is not a stick I am hitting Libertarians with because it's a silly group filled with people on the spectrum. I mentioned it precisely because those people, the most looney left-Libertarians, are the only ones standing by the principles. The King of Gondor is dancing naked on stage to protest government corruption, foaming at the mouth at the mere insinuation that people need take a test to drive a car. And he is a legitimate noble king. Far more so now than ever before as the 'respectable' and 'sensible' or 'adult' Libertarians walk back on their oath to liberty above all to protest trannies and drag queens.

I would say Libertarianism is futile because eventually Libertarians realize they don't want to live in a society filled with things they don't like. They actually want nice things. A nice society, like described by Hoppe. Some might even recognize, on some level, though it is a stretch, that just because they like smoking weed doesn't mean it's good for a free market economy to actively promote it to children like it's soda. In fact soda might be just as bad or even worse, I mean, look at the obesity rates...

Libertarians, like others, see expressions and assertions of morals that are too alien to them as inherently hostile. And as they grow in a world where the consequences of freedom start encroaching on other sensibilities they hold alongside liberty, they start moving away from liberty towards something else. Sure, it takes them more time than others, as they value liberty more than others. But it's just a matter of degree. And when the existence and free expression of moral aliens manages to sufficiently push society to a place so foreign and abnormal to Libertarian sensibilities that they balk at the notion that these people be free then there is no difference between a Libertarian and a person who wanted to nip this in the bud long before it got this out of hand.

Far more so now than ever before as the 'respectable' and 'sensible' or 'adult' Libertarians walk back on their oath to liberty above all to protest trannies and drag queens.

You can go quite a long way (indeed, in some cases further than I'd like to go) into attempting to disassemble LGBTQI without doing anything that technically breaks libertine principles.

  1. banning LGBTQI rhetoric from being taught in public schools: this doesn't technically infringe anyone's freedom of speech in the usual libertine construction. The teachers can still say it, they just can't say it on the clock and still get paid (free contract - they're employed by the State, and the State can set conditions of what is and is not their job), and they are entirely free to pick another career or find another - private - employer who will pay them to teach kids LGBTQI. (If you want to go the galaxy-brain libertine position on this, you could also just disestablish schools.)

  2. removing gay marriage: marriage is a social construct, not a physical action; you have no liberty right to society agreeing with your idea. Fucking is a physical action, and it's against liberty to ban that, but since unmarried sex is legal that's not relevant. Similar reasoning applies to legal transition.

  3. defunding transition therapy: it's against liberty to ban cosmetic surgery, but it's up to society what society pays for.

  4. removing pronoun policies: these are anti-libertine in the first place; you can call yourself what you like, but whether other people go along with it is, in a place with free speech, their decision (free contract prevents you from stamping these out when it's a private actor with no public funding imposing it, though; see above).

These examples still feature a Libertarian infringing on the rights of others, just by using the state as a medium.

Why should it be the libertarian that gets their way with regards to what a teacher can and can't say? If the teacher wants to espouse LGBT stuff why not let them? Isn't that more freedom for the teacher? Why should they, the teachers, be the ones who have to live under a society that stifles their speech if they want to keep their job?

I know libertarians can justify whatever they want to justify. As Hoppe did most eloquently when he advocated for the physical removal of those who violate a hypothetical covenant made between people who want to maintain some sort of society they like. The point I am making is that a libertarian loses any and all moral highground as soon as they stoop to this level. Suddenly their notions of freedom are no greater than mine. They want to live in a society of a certain flavor.

The difference between you and Hoppe is that he doesn't want a monopoly on what a good society is. The Taliban and Californians get to live in their own little hellholes they made for themselves if they want to. And we only bomb them to a crisp if they fuck with us, none of this civilizing crap, no interference. I don't trust you to have the same restraint. Like the Californians you wouldn't want to leave people alone if you can "help" them.

So instead of rotating between the two clichés of "you said they'd be no rules but here you are enforcing rules" and "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds", which are both completely discarding what libs actually believe in, maybe explain to me how you freely nipping things in the bud doesn't turn tyrannical.

Hoppe does want a monopoly on what a good society is in the society he lives in, even in a Libertarian utopia. He wants the ability to freely associate with those who agree with him and freely disassociate from those who don't. To the end of ostracizing those he does not like from his society and protecting his society from those that would harm it. He does not want to live with the 'undesirables' or subject himself to their whim and suffer through whatever affronts to his moral sensibilities that their twisted minds can come up with after they've been afforded the freedom to do so.

You trusting him more than me to not have that ball roll into some kind of totalitarian foreign policy is completely irrelevant to my stated views. If that's all you have I am very content with saying you don't have much. Because I am not asking for something radically different from Hoppe. I just want the thing formalized in plain English instead of squeezing it out through Libertarian priors.

I assume my preferred views wont lead to "tyranny" for the same reason Libertarians assume theirs wont lead to "tyranny".

Really it comes down to a simple question.

Do you guarantee exit rights? And if so, how?

That's the difference between you and him. And I think it's significant.

The same way Libertarians "guarantee" anything. By making stuff up on internet forums.

I believe my principles and my vision for the future will lead to good just like Libertarians believe about theirs. The thinly veiled insinuations that I don't sufficiently share your values or hold the correct ones in high enough regard to be trusted is, to not labour a point, asinine.

To some degree you're right, promises from the sovereign are inherently easy to break. But I don't think asking for cryptographic guarantees that you can't seize my assets and institutional control or something is unreasonable or difficult these days.

Or if we want to remain within the realm of making shit up, a base culture and custom of limited government goes a long way. Made up religions like libertarianism actually have important concrete effects.

I guess another way of asking that question is how do I know you're not going to pull a Stalin? Most non-anarchist, even of the absolute monarchist kind, have an answer to that question. And when they don't, like the Italian street brawlers, it's not encouraging.

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Just to steel man the libertarians, I’ve always appreciated that unlike almost every other political party, they actually live by their principles. They aren’t just in favor of liberty and government non-interference when it suits them. They’re in favor of letting people do as they please even when they hate the choices being made. Other parties don’t tend to do that and their bases tend to make excuses for why it’s necessary to sell out their stated beliefs and principles.

I tend to lean libertarian in some ways, I don’t think the government should be able to police much of adult consenting behavior. The government exists to prevent fraud, abuse, and crimes. It doesn’t exist to rescue you from your bad decisions, nor to prevent you from making bad decisions. It doesn’t even exist to provide a retirement. On the other hand, I don’t think that means you can’t make reasonable laws, you can require information be provided, you can create strong civil codes that forbid fraud, and allow for strong tort law.

This is the fight you and all other Boromirs of your kind are always perplexed by.

I very much enjoyed this and found your argument captivating, but as a Boromir, sometimes the communists are raping the nuns and emptying the prisons and you have to fight. Not taking the ring is the worse choice. But again as a principle and a standard two thumbs up

It’s because I believe in social contagion (and the broad right) that pride is bad and I don’t want the next generation of children to be more gay and transexual.

I don't think this is fair. Pride has become one of those things that you really can't speak against (much like blasphemy). I don't like Pride being taught in public schools for the same reason I don't like religion being taught in public schools.

There's also a line between teaching acceptance and teaching that cultural institutions are evil and must be torn down. :marseyshrug:

Just going to throw this out as a tangent. Looks like Argentinas likely next President will be a far-right libertarian Trump supporter wanting to dollarize.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/argentina-update-canine-mastiff-edition.html

Seems like a lot of libertarian talk going on so feels like it’s connected.

Edit: asked an ex from Argentina what she thought about him. She said her age group has a saying

“Of course! There’s a saying among my generation Milei or EZE”

I fundamentally don't understand the right in latin America. Why does it like the US? Latin Americans aren't exactly leading in the field of woke-ideology. More woke ideology has been produced on single American college campuses than much of the rest of the world. Do they think they are getting their based right wing state together with Victoria Nuland and Kamala Harris? Pro dollarization means pro wall street. How right wing will they be selling out their country to foreign financial interests that want everything ESG-rated?

I am all the way to the right. However, in Latin America6o I consistently find myself supporting leftist parties. They don't want their natural resources sold off to foreigners or their country turned into a banana republic, and in general they seem far less interested in hanging out with the elites in the wokest country on the planet.

The right in Argentina has elected a world economic forum banker. While he might anger some feminists on twitter it is clear where Argentina is heading.

The United States, for all its heavy-handed and blundering interference, cannot hold a candle to leftism in terms of destroying countries. Socialism in the UK after WWII left it with rationing longer than Germany had. Communism kept Cuba poor and wrecked Venezuela. No matter how bad it gets, communism can make it worse, unless it's already communist.

The US is the bastion of leftism today. The US has invented more genders than the rest of the world combined. The US is involved in organizing pride parades all over the world. The US is world leading in critical theory, third wave feminism and pushing radical forms of diversity. The US is probably the only place in the world in which people got fired for not wanting to defund the police.

wrecked Venezuela.

Along with having their assets illegally stolen, blockades and sanctions.

Latin American countries do best when they cozy up to the US. Conservatism isn’t about trying grand new ideas to chart your own path- it’s about doing more of what works. For Latin America, that’s being pro-America and using dollars and having economic ties with the USA and capitalism and all that.

Why does it like the US?

Because the United States rocks. It's super rich, there's massive opportunity for people from all sorts of backgrounds, and people that aren't jaded often do still view it as the land of opportunity. Throw in some Chicago Boys influence and you're going to have some people that are enthusiastic about economics that gets called "right-wing" in some circles.

The US has destroyed latin American countries, sucked resources out of them and bullied them for a century. Pretty much every awful social trend comes from the US.

The US has destroyed latin American countries, sucked resources out of them and bullied them for a century.

No, it hasn't. This is loser ideology. "Nothing is our fault, we are the victims of history".

I will concede that resource extraction tends to be bad for a country's economic development. But there is no alternate history where Latin American countries like Cuba, Argentina, or Venezuela become economic powerhouses on the basis of their homegrown human resources.

Like nearly all countries, Latin American countries are best off when they import the technological advances of the United States without fucking it up too much with their own corruption, socialism, and zero sum thinking.

You need to provide supporting evidence for this.

I would agree we’ve bullied them. I wouldn’t agree we’ve destroyed them. What have we mostly done when we’ve intervened? Defeated communists. Sometimes propping up a dictator. But communism has failed everywhere so I feel fairly confident this was a net positive for them.

I think the “destroyed” Latin America is factually false. And of course the country that most adopted neoliberalism - Chile is the richest. And one them that went most commie like Venezuela is poor despite resource wealth.

I fundamentally don't understand the right in latin America. Why does it like the US?

The left hates the US, the right hates the left.

the right hates the left.

In other words, a world economic forum banker who likes the US should be enemy number one.

I would imagine the WEF doesn't look all that left-wing from a South American perspective. One can, at least, easily find a positive article about Bolsonaro on their page, for instance. Apparently Colombia's ex-prez Uribe has also given the closing address to one of their events. I daresay that Milei working for WEF might tell more about WEF than about Milei, actually.

In general, the idea that WEF is some sort of a global left-wing plot is really based more on American (and partly European) right-wing imagination and malicious readings of what the WEF actually says and does than on actual WEF actions and content.

The financial industry absolutely is. They are pressing hard for global homogeneity, less national sovereignty and the values of a Netflix show. The biggest spreader of woke ideas has been the corporate elite. The goal of liberal elites is to turn the world into a giant heathrow terminal. Massive surveillance, bland consumerism and placelessness.

Do you really think they are getting their traditional culture, Catholicism and social conservatism together with Amazon and the US state department?

The Latin American left has traditionally been quite big on national sovereignty, though. Probably quite against global homogeneity (the support for indigenousness etc.), too, though.

Do you really think they are getting their traditional culture, Catholicism and social conservatism

Insofar as everything I've seen on social media says, those aren't Milei's thing quite as much as privatizing everything, slashing taxes and generally implementing a libertarian economic policy is.

I think it's vastly more "libertarian" than anything else, at least if we are taking him at face value (and there's some reason to do so given his career). Still probably goes nowhere. Eagerly waiting for @Soriek's writeup.

@functor

Have you ever lived in a country with hyperinflation? This is my third one at this point and let me tell you, it got old the first time.

Have you ever lived in a country with hyperinflation? This is my third one at this point and let me tell you, it got old the first time.

I am really not sure a globalist banker is a better option for it. Dollarization is a terrible idea as it will lead to Argentina exporting products and importing money created out of air.

It is kind of funny as the right in the US seems to hate the federal reserve yet this Argentinian likes it even though they are getting a shorter end of the stick. Americans at least get to create money out of thin air. Argentinians get money created from air in exchange for products. Libertarians seem to like gold.

Have you ever lived in a country with hyperinflation?

Reasonable inflation as of lately. I have however experienced living in a country with a half million migrants from America's attempt to bring wall mart to the middle east.

I don’t believe dollarization requires importing of dollars to happen. Theoretically it could be done without ever importing dollars. Realistically you probably need to have some foreign currency reserves to guarantee the value when the currency dips below a level.

It would require Argentina to run monetary policy in-line with the US. And to have roughly similar inflation rates etc.

The key thing is getting traders to have no preference between owning Argentinian pesos and dollars at whatever peg you set and relative interest rates.

The big issue with dollarization is it gives up independent monetary policy and you can’t tighten when your economy is hotter than the US or ease when your economy is softer than the US.

To be honest I don't think your position here is deeply reasoned, it looks like generic kneejerk «anti-globalism». Dollars have more staying value than Argentinian exports, much as I love me a decent steak. I won't go all NATOwave here, but it is necessary to recognize that nations can fail overwhelmingly for their own fault, even when Americans happen to be fairly graceful with their influence. This also isn't about right- or left-wing in the myopic tribal sense. Lastly, I am not trying to sell you on Milei's policy proposals, but just to explain Argentinian perspective. They don't feel like they can afford more of this bullshit.

Decades after the war, Argentina is peppered with ressantiment-filled Malvinas memorials (very much a «Crimea ours» vibe, only it feels safely toothless). This coexists peacefully with an already enormous share of dollars in cash, and socialist politics. It's a very populist, very short-time-preference society, that takes «kicking the can down the road» principle to its limit while the rich and well-connected enjoy prosperity (or comfortably emigrate) and the poor get poorer. Over 100% (more like 200% now? USD:ARS is at 670 right now; it was below 400 in May) YoY inflation is not an inconvenience but a catastrophe, it makes people unable to save and invest, it actually tests how much poverty you need to increase crime rate, it kills hope. @2rafa had some interesting notes on this topic.

Of course, I believe Argentinians will be unable to take the triage-like measures necessary to salvage the economy (even if Milei is elected, which is unlikely, and gets to execute on his plans, which is implausible) and flinch back to Kirchnerism, which you will probably approve of as a brave stance against the GAE.

wanting to dollarize

Not quite. He's actually only looking to do that to liquidate the central bank and privatize money.

My Hoppean friends are overcome with joy.

I may do a post later for Milei, was surprised to see him break polls so significantly. His party will probably be a minority and I remain unconvinced Argentina even can dollarize but it's certainly a sign of a country sick of its establishment parties.

I like him off the bat. I have the same dog naming scheme.

I don’t think you can have a stable solution when the entire modus opperandi for a lot of LGBT and BLM activists is push as hard and as far as possible and don’t ever stop. The endpoint you’d want to get to is their starting point. As such, unfortunately (since my general sense is more or less 18+ libertarianism, with the caveat that you cannot force other people to go along with what you want) it’s hardball all the time because the only stable position at this point is to go far enough backwards that they’d have to move forward to get to where it was 5 years ago.

Of course I think the same problem exists with Hannania’s new position on race. Treat everyone the same. Be tough on crime. Do I think being colorblind will be accepted by the left when it ends up with whites always on top and blacks on the bottom with a lot of black men in prison? No.

Thank you for the chance to vent on this: I just listened to him talk with Rufo on this and they sounded - frankly - delusional.

The things that they and others cite - AA is unpopular with the general public - just don't seem to matter that much. Because...the public hasn't had to live with the outcomes Hanania predicts in living memory (when they did, they could easily blame it on racism).

When I see normies and progressives agree with SCOTUS' AA decision the idea is always "good, do it by class". But that's cause normies aren't HBDers like Hanania. What does he think is going to happen when we get #OscarSoWhite every couple of years at some major college or you see huge jail sentences for black people?

Most likely outcome: exactly what we're seeing now. People like Kendi are looking a step ahead, like Hanania and unlike normies they know "lol, class" isn't a solution right now, which is why they've forced the dilemma of "either it's society or you're saying our kids are broken". As you say: most people, even Republicans, don't want to bite the bullet here. If they do, they do similar moves to "I'm not against gays but.." like "well, it's the culture...", which not only gets called racist but still suggests AA.

I don't even know what I'd do if it came to my vote, and I think just being here and being so open to his takes marks me out as pretty atypical.

The only charitable explanation I have is that Hanania doesn't actually think you can reason people into separating race from everything (at least not those with a lot to lose). The plan would be to simply not sound super-racist (Hoste-like, one might say) so you can build enough of a mixed coalition with minorities with success in America like Vivek that you can tell blacks and their most devoted prog allies to suck it up without causing another Racial Reckoning. But even that sounds dubious.

While I think these positions are unstable I’m not sure the right could move the country to the stable positions.

I doubt it. Because the consensus has been broken and leftists , deliberately or not, act in ways that break up groups that might stand against the new status quo (e.g. more and more people identifying as some sort of alphabet person). Even if the Right could muster up the courage to maintain a substantive exclusionary position I don't know that it matters.

It's like racial homogeneity: easy to keep. Once it's gone it's much harder to argue for.

What does he think is going to happen when we get #OscarSoWhite every couple of years at some major college or you see huge jail sentences for black people?

The exact same thing that happens now when rural white people talk about how they're actively discriminated against by elite institutions - a bunch of basement-dwellers complaining on TheDailyKendi or Blackfront about how it isn't fair and that actually society is being racist against them. If his side has gotten the policy changes they want, they necessarily have the cultural power and influence to cast their opposition into the same dustbin of popular opinion that white nationalism exists in now.

a mixed coalition with minorities with success in America like Vivek that you can tell blacks and their most devoted prog allies to suck it up without causing another Racial Reckoning

The obvious solution is to import 5 million cream of the crop Nigerians who proceed to take their rightful place at the top of society. Then "black people" as a whole in the US will be doing well and you can tell the low end ADOSs to take a hike since if contemporary racism was the issue then how come blacks are now doing pretty well in top positions?

Amen brother! I wish first world countries would just pull their heads out of the sand and start importing massive amounts of smart foreigners. The possibility won't be there forever, and the longer we wait the worse things get.

Hell we could even just make it easier to get smart white people in here. IQ over 105? You're in!

Are you going to force these elite Nigerians to live in places that most black Americans actually live and intermarry with them? If not, ADOS black Americans will remain a distinctive group, and thanks to disproportionately living in Southern and Midwestern swing states they will remain politically powerful above what their numbers would suggest.

Are you going to force these elite Nigerians to live in places that most black Americans actually live and intermarry with them?

Maybe not them but their grand-kids?

I think you underestimate how good Americans are at assimilation. They only have to win once, and they usually do.

To be clear, I think the smart Nigerians would assimilate and do fine in America. It's just that given the choice like every other high IQ immigrant group they'll mostly gravitate toward wealthy blue cities and assimilate into that milieu (doing wonders for, say, Ivy League schools looking to become more aesthetically diverse), which doesn't really do anything to fix the problems of existing black Americans that mostly live elsewhere or to dilute the outsized political power held by that group (White Americans are also overrepresented by their political system, but they don't bloc vote anywhere near as intensely.). Black Americans (and the Robin DiAngelos of the world, for that matter) in places like St. Louis aren't going to be impressed that a bunch of immigrants that look like but don't sound or act much like them are making money any more than white Americans in places like rural Kentucky are impressed by people that look like them doing well in the Acela corridor.

Why would they need to do any of that? The ADOS can just remain a distinctive group that's mired in generational poverty, misery and crime - but this will actually fix the problem because they won't be able to say that the reason why is racism. "Racism" defeated, and life gets worse for everyone (except maybe the elite Nigerians) - sure, that's a terrible outcome, but it isn't really that different from the outcomes of a lot of antiracist proposals.

That's going to be tough to pull off as long as so many black Americans live in swing states (A bunch of Nigerians moving to coastal cities and doing well isn't going to change the electoral map all that much.). It can be (and has been done) with American Indians because there's not a lot of them, and Appalachian whites can mostly be ignored because they live in a handful of deep red states, but black Americans are too numerous, too strategically located (and institutionally embedded) to just ignore, and too convenient a cudgel for white liberals to wield toward white conservatives to pass up.

Maybe the Democratic Party radically changes its marketing strategy and the electoral map changes in the future such that Southern and Midwestern swing states aren't so important, but for now the Democrats are the party of Biden, and they're presently re-engineering the primary calendar to make black Southerners more important, not less.

Nope, the point is to shut the ADOS's up by refuting their claims of "racism" by having huge amounts of very successful black people in the country, not destroy their group identity.

IMO Hannania has shown stats that foreign blacks with graduate degrees have kids that are not doing much above average ADOS on test scores. So I’m not sure that’s a solution.

"well, it's the culture...", which not only gets called racist but still suggests AA.

How does that follow? The solution to "it's the culture" is to fix the damn culture. Hold black people to the same job/college standards that everyone else is held to, no more no less, and if any assistance is provided then it should be in the form of teaching them how to escape the broken culture so that they can meet those standards.

I can see how that would be viewed as racist by people who think that thug culture is authentically black, but I view those people as the real racists because thug culture is awful, and to purport that black people are unable to avoid it is to suggest that black people are inherently awful. And also wrong (as demonstrated by the many who do avoid it).

Genes play a part, because of course they do, but pretty much every trait is a mix of nature and nurture. To the extent that nurture is a lever we can pull, and nature is not, let's pull the nurture lever and see how far it gets us. My guess is like 80% of the discrepancy is culture and 20% is genetic, but even if it's 50-50 or even 20-80, solving the cultural issue would solve a non-negligible portion of the issue, and see massive gains for black people and for everyone who ever interacts with them. Which multiplied by millions of people is a huge win for society. And then after we've dealt with that we can figure out what to do about HBD if anything still needs to be done by then.

How does that follow? The solution to "it's the culture" is to fix the damn culture. Hold black people to the same job/college standards that everyone else is held to, no more no less, and if any assistance is provided then it should be in the form of teaching them how to escape the broken culture so that they can meet those standards.

If you tell certain groups that it is the culture, the conclusion they'll draw is that racism caused that culture (and you can't draw on biology as a counter). Which justifies hamfisted remedies.

Especially since a lot of interventions have to start late - Harvard isn't going to set up pre-schools so it's easier to do it come admissions time. If there are as many Miles Moraleses as Peter Parkers then there is a stronger argument for doing AA. The Murrayian argument against it is precisely that there aren't and it ends up hurting people and causing all sorts of distortions (like promoting kids past their - relatively immutable - IQ warrants, which is less of an issue here).

And we're talking about Hanania. He doesn't believe it's the culture*. So what happens when it inevitably doesn't fix the problem?

Well, clearly the country is more racist than expected! (You are here x)

* He might echo your last paragraph, but imo only to lull normies. He doesn't come across as anywhere near this optimistic. Murray either. If they did the solution would probably not be to dismantle systems that give the "disadvantaged" a leg up first.

If you tell certain groups that it is the culture, the conclusion they'll draw is that racism caused that culture

This is probably a reasonable conclusion to draw. Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" paints a pretty convincing picture of how black slaves, stripped from their homes in Africa and brought to the southern U.S., picked up the lazy violent redneck culture of the people around them, which over time morphed into its own variant, but still shares enough similarities that you can trace its lineage back to the same source.

Now, several centuries later, I don't think it's fair to primarily blame modern white people for inculcating it into their ancestors when more of the blame would be appropriately placed on the more recent generations of black (and white) people who have propagated it and resisted attempts to change it. To the extent that reparations were deserved by black people for slavery, I think making all of them U.S. citizens with all of the same rights fulfills that (Look at the average living conditions of people who were enslaved and brought to the U.S., and look at the average living conditions of people born in Africa today. I think our debts are paid.) Further, I don't think we have more of an obligation to help lift black redneck/thugs out of their degenerate culture than we do to help lift white rednecks out of theirs. But I don't think we need to have a burden of guilt in order to recognize actions that would help people and do them anyway, because it's the right thing to do. I don't feel any personal responsibility for causing black people to have the culture or the economic or social problems that come with it, either via slavery or Jim Crow laws or racism, none of which I or my immediate family contributed to. I would like to help them anyway if possible.

Especially since a lot of interventions have to start late - Harvard isn't going to set up pre-schools so it's easier to do it come admissions time.

To the extent that Harvard wants to get involved in humanitarian efforts to uplift underprivileged people, it should do it in a race-neutral way. Because the root cause of black people's issue is some combination of culture and genes (and this particular argument does not depend on what the ratio of those actually is, even exclusively one or the other) rather than racism, Harvard cannot influence them to actually solve the issue. Race-based affirmative action only serves to help out the fraction of black people who aren't underprivileged (because they didn't grow up in thug culture, or because they happen to have enough high IQ genes [even HBD is about averages, and thus allows for uncommonly intelligent black people via variance]). Further, holding people to lower standards decreases the signalling strength of their diplomas and thus retroactively justifies rational racism on the part of people looking to hire people with Harvard degrees. If instead you hold everyone to the same standard, then even if fewer black people get through, the ones who do will actually gain full values from their degree. Which, especially if culture is the dominant factor, creates a gateway to success for black people who want to escape that culture and become successful. But even if genes predominate, this still enables a way for above-average intelligence black people to distinguish themselves from the average.

I think some of the points that AA advocates make are legitimate, I can create thought experiments in which some individuals benefit from it. It's just that the costs tend to be higher, and the entire strategy is strictly inferior to a class based AA, which carries fewer costs and more benefits.

If instead you hold everyone to the same standard, then even if fewer black people get through, the ones who do will actually gain full values from their degree. Which, especially if culture is the dominant factor, creates a gateway to success for black people who want to escape that culture and become successful. But even if genes predominate, this still enables a way for above-average intelligence black people to distinguish themselves from the average.

I see no way in which the benefit to fewer degree holders will overcome the total wreckage for everyone else.

If the anti-hereditarians are right, I see far less reason to not provide AA since we know class-based AA will disadvantage blacks. If we can't blame genes we will have to look at things like where blacks live, which may or may not be blamed on racism. But, even putting that aside, if blacks won't inherently revert to the mean as HBDers claim, if the "dumb" AA students are only merely disadvantaged by living with the wrong people (as opposed to being promoted to schools well past their competence) why not take them? You're going to miss out on the chance to give the future leaders of the community even more cachet so they can shape the community? In the name of...changing the norms of the community?

Like, I don't think Obama has caused a major change in norms but it's probably better to have had him and men like him than not. By his wife's own account people like her might not have made it without AA.

If Hanania and Murray are right there's also almost no way getting rid of AA is better for black people.

I'll use Murray, since he gives us clear numbers on what he thinks happens at the top scores in Facing Reality:

The College Board declined my request for the data that would give me the precise numbers, but the published breakdowns allow for reasonably accurate estimates of how many students of each race get 1500 or higher on the SAT.1 The numbers of test takers with a combined verbal and math score of 1500+ were around 900 for Africans and around 3,300 for Latins. Meanwhile, the numbers for Europeans and Asians with scores in that range were about 27,500 and 20,000 respectively.

900 & 3,300...to 27,000. There is no set of hidden benefits to disadvantaging everyone apart from this population that'll make it worth it for the losers.

If you want to do as Murray does and argue for meritocracy or a politics of difference, okay. But it just isn't one of those "rising tide" situations. Someone has to lose in a meritocracy. Allegedly entire categories of "someones", sometimes.

Yes, John McWhorter and Neil DeGrasse Tyson will lose that asterisk - but they seem to have shed it on their own anyway. But plenty of black people will never get a shot at all at that level. Yes, as it stands now there's some drag on Harvard's credibility and the credibility of black AA beneficiaries. But, as I said, most people are normies and either don't know the details of AA or know better than to say and Harvard is clearly maintaining enough of its prestige for them to get benefits.

You're also leaving out the problem that feminists run into: women's revealed preference is to work less, let's say we had a legal situation that allowed most women to do so. It would create its own negative stereotype. You're worried about the stereotype that McWhorters have to swim against, but you forget the much older prejudice of "yeah, he made it through X but maybe he slipped through the cracks. I'd prefer a white. "

There's almost no way a wipeout better from the African-American perspective than the current messy system that at least incentivizes Harvard to find some ADOS blacks (even if most of them are Nigerians)

How does class-based AA disadvantage blacks? If blacks are disproportionately poor, then they're disproportionately likely to fall into the category that the class-based AA is looking for. Granted, they'll have to compete against poor white and asian students for those slots, but they won't have to compete against wealthy Nigerians. Obviously if you measure "black" as a class and look at the average outcomes across all of them it will go down as benefits shift from wealthy black people towards poor white people, but it's not obvious to me (possible, but not obvious) that poor black people, as individuals, would lose out by the switch.

Granted, they'll have to compete against poor white and asian students for those slots

And, apparently, they lose. Which is why Harvard and the NY magnet schools were in the mess they were in.

Your point might be true, if we took "disadvantaged" to mean "pushed to engage in slanted competition" as opposed to "disproportionately loses in competition". But the latter situation is at least in play now.

but they won't have to compete against wealthy Nigerians.

They will have to compete with a bunch of poor or "poor" Nigerians and other immigrants who are technically lower SES still have some social capital (this is the standard explanation of "model minority" success)

But, again, if people like Hanania are right: both groups are not only taken to the cleaners by Asians now, they will continue to do so indefinitely.

If your argument was for race + class-based affirmative action to cut out well-off Nigerians it'd be one thing. But pure class AA is another thing entirely.

Especially since a lot of interventions have to start late - Harvard isn't going to set up pre-schools so it's easier to do it come admissions time.

I don’t think that the preschools most black people go to, even ghetto blacks, are transmitting the ghetto culture. It’s rap music, fatherlessness leading to lack of availability of good male role models, and all the usual things conservatives point to. Because even ghetto daycares are not trying to convince their students to be promiscuous, lazy thieves and drug users.

like "well, it's the culture...", which not only gets called racist but still suggests AA.

No it doesn’t, it suggests blacks should either fix their culture or use white culture.

Almost from a marketing position it just doesn’t feel like it’s defensible especially in the current environment.

You end up with some autists like me. Largely male probably well above average quantitively. Then some working class coalition. But I don’t see how Vivek’s position is going to work on midtwits. The 5-30% of the IQ spectrum. The people who fill the bureaucracy and PMC. Kendi’s arguments will fill that as the positions crumble under accusations of bigotry etc. Which then means your best political outcome is a Trump trying to do things with everyone below his direct appointees opposed. You won’t get anything done and lose. And the people then recruiting for you and getting votes end up being Alex Jones types. Which Hannania complains the GOP is stupid but then he won’t sell what he wants. So you end with a slider/Thiel coalition with Alex Jones voters.

It feels like asking for a ceasefire. And hoping the left gets bored with their current thing. It’s failing to make the arguments you actual believe which is where I get this unstable feeling. Now I can’t figure out how to sell that so figured I’m not that smart but no one is doing it.

I guess the best possibility for what I call a “ceasefire” would be to get a Desantis type who can dismantle some institutional advantages while playing for time.

But I don’t see how Vivek’s position is going to work on midtwits.

Why not? I think the counter that I find pretty compelling is also compelling to "midtwits", regardless of what the think the underlying cause of differences is. When a dark brown guy like Vivek, or a first-generation Asian-American, or a dude named Carlos says, "I'm doing well and I don't think racism substantially impacted me", I really do think this is close to a killshot on the argument that black Americans struggle because of oppression. The Kendi-style arguments or Hannah Nicole-Jones resorts to deeper history require more time and cultural buy-in to explain than just looking at Vivek and saying, "well, that is kinda fishy that we're a racist country, but these browns dudes move here and do great".

America has more successful immigrants of color than ever before. Has the argument that America is a racist country been refuted? I don't think so. If anything, we've just imported a bunch of Saira Raos to tell us how racist we are.

There are a few probably unfixable problems here: One, other groups being successful doesn't make black Americans successful. They can easily claim that the new arrivals discriminate against them just as much as white Americans (sometime moreso; it never occurred to white Americans to monopolize the business of black haircare products like it did to the Koreans), that new immigrants didn't suffer slavery or Jim Crow or whatever, and this can't be refuted.

Two, as alluded to above, there's nothing to stop the new immigrants from claiming that they, too, are victims of racism. It doesn't matter if they are in fact "privileged" in every objective measure relative to the average white American. There's status to be had in victimhood and if anything high-IQ immigrants will just be smarter at it than the locals.

While I think these positions are unstable I’m not sure the right could move the country to the stable positions. Which would be widespread knowledge that a great deal of disparate outcome is from hbd and on pride matters getting the country to agree that lgbtq lifestyles are not desirable (which was the world pre-2008). As it is the current positions seem unstable to me and easily attacked by the left and to a great extent makes the right look like hypocrites afraid to say the quiet part out loud.

I am a little confused about your description of these sets of beliefs as "stable." Based on my own read of history (and as you acknowledge in your post) these beliefs were quite common historically and are much less common today. Assuming we could wave some wand and restore the historical status quo of beliefs why wouldn't they evolve into the beliefs we have today? What new arguments are going to be marshaled in support of "lgbtq lifestyles are not desirable" or "African-American's place in society is mostly the result of genetics"? If no new arguments, why would the ones that failed historically succeed now?

While I think these positions are unstable I’m not sure the right could move the country to the stable positions. Which would be widespread knowledge that a great deal of disparate outcome is from hbd and on pride matters getting the country to agree that lgbtq lifestyles are not desirable (which was the world pre-2008)

A GOP candidate could probably tread out a policy platform that mostly bridges the gap between the idea of libertarianism for adults but paternalism for children by focusing in on the family unit as a core, fundamental, and necessary component of the nation's future success, on a purely pragmatic level, rather than falling back to religious arguments. And thus government is as a purely practical matter going to treat family formation and the creation and raising of children as paramount matters of concern (the Constitution says "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" after all), while ultimately leaving any person who opts not to form such families alone.

That is, with a looming demographics crisis, the only way that there is a guaranteed future for the country is kids, who will go on to raise their own kids, etc.

So pushing Marriage to the forefront as a fundamental social institution again, and creating a legal framework for giving [married] people who produce AND raise children incentives, protections, and stability to bolster their social status and social capital. AND emphasizing that it is not the job of teachers, bureaucrats, or pundits to instill values in the children, and thus there should be near-zero tolerance for parties that interfere in that relationship between parent and child, doubly so if they hold positions of trust bestowed upon them by government. And in exchange, marriages are harder to unilaterally terminate.

This leaves a gaping hole as to WHAT values 'ought' to be instilled in children, and at least requires us to ask if there are any values that emphatically should not be instilled in children.

But for my purposes, I'm happy to say that parents should have the ability to raise their kids according to the values the parents, themselves, support AND ALSO that kids shouldn't be undergoing irreversible procedures that they lack the philosophical and psychological ability to consent to, even if they're given legal ability to consent.

A hard line drawn in the sand, "leave the kids alone" but also "leave the gays alone, too!" is probably enough to build a winning national coalition on, conditional on all the other policies that get clustered in. Especially if backed by the well-founded premise that "children raised in intact biological families universally have better outcomes" and therefore the good of the children is best achieved by privileging intact families.

And here's the more wacky proposal that might ruin the ability to build a coalition, but might be key to making this whole thing work:

I think that rather than a blanket age at which someone transitions to adulthood and is emancipated from their parents... there should be some kind of more literal rite of passage (not literally this one, mind) that, upon completion, triggers said emancipation. So children who are precocious and 'ready' for adulthood earlier can get their freedom, and those who are, let us say, "stunted" may remain the ward of their parents for several additional years, possibly into their early twenties.

And parents, as part of that legal framework mentioned above, will be given various legal privileges based on how many children they raise who successfully achieve emancipation.

This would give the parents some additional incentive to actively prepare their children to become independent adults, but also ensure that kids who aren't really ready are kept under a watchful, protective eye a bit longer. I think there are a number of goals this achieves, but one is that it does help prevent the risk of 'grooming' wherein older adults will target immature teens who are on the cusp of reaching the age of consent by exploiting their immaturity, since now the legality of having sex with them is no longer based on them hitting an arbitrary date.

I dunno, the whole issue is that the changes that will actually work almost certainly have to come as a package, and it would be hard for a GOP candidate to achieve that whole package without a 'mandate' from the voters and the will to stand ground, so it is probably more than can be achieved in a single term or even two terms.

there should be some kind of more literal rite of passage that, upon completion, triggers said emancipation

Any suggestions? One of the few things I can think of that satisfies being challenging, demonstrating (limited, for the naysayers) competence and is broadly recognised as (again for the naysayers, largely) legitimate is military or some comparable form of national service. But last time that idea was floated at the old place it was dismissed as being literal slavery (beside the objection that the army and every other profession doesn't want them). Which, hyperbole aside, is admittedly a problem: How can you place demands on a populace under threat of withholding rights and still call yourselves defenders of freedom? Whichever way you look at it it boils down to a state-to-citizen quid pro quo.

The trouble is for it to hold any significance it must impart a cost, and even if the benefits outweigh the costs people will still bristle at the need for any measure of sacrifice.

Pilgrimage? Mortification? Or something altogether more milquetoast like graduating high school, which many here are just as eager to condemn as little different from slavery and imprisonment. Or how about tying it to your first point and make it necessary to have raised a child who graduates high school? Three birds with one stone!

Any suggestions?

At the broadest, I could see there being some set of standardized tests that try to capture the would-be adults' actual understanding of the world and the implications of entering certain kinds of contracts and relationships. Do they understand how compound interest works? Do they get that sexual activity can lead to pregnancies, STDs, and emotional entanglement? And do they have enough understanding of their own biology to get that certain medical procedures are irreversible and certain drugs are inherently addictive and 'harmful?' If they meet some threshold of understanding, then they get their official 'adulting license' and can be permitted to enter the world as an independent individual.

This is basically how we handle driver's licenses, just expanded out to other privileges of adulthood.

This is, broadly speaking, how we could tell that someone possesses the psychological prerequisites to engage with other 'adults' as equals and can truly consent to various contracts that they'll be entering into.

Now, in an ideal world, "graduated from high school" SHOULD be sufficient to qualify someone as a Level One Adult. I don't think I need to argue the point that it is, demonstrably, NOT enough to prep someone for adulthood in the modern world.

I do think there would need to be some practical/skills based element to it. The thing I like about the Ant-Glove test in that link I posted is it directly checks the mental fortitude of the person subjected to it. Can they endure extreme discomfort without complaint or having a complete mental breakdown. Babies will cry at the slightest feeling of pain. Adults can endure hours of suffering if they believe it will improve their lives or their children's lives.

So what sort of tests are there that someone who is mentally stable and mature would pass handily, but would tend to filter out those who are unable to control their emotions and are repelled by discomfort and are too impulsive to endure painful experiences for later rewards?

Based on my personal preferences, I might suggest some kind of demonstration of martial prowess. Fight 10 different guys in a row, five minutes per round, with 5 minutes of rest in between each round. No need to win, just prove you can push through pain and discomfort and can at least keep your damn hands up by the end of it.

Or how about tying it to your first point and make it necessary to have raised a child who graduates high school?

... funny enough there's an element of sense to this, with the argument being that one doesn't fully understand what it means to be an adult until you've been on both sides of the child-rearing equation.

Despite not being a parent myself I have a solid sympathy with the idea that you're not really eligible for real grown up status until you're a parent. The difficulty is that making parenthood the benchmark is that it would accord a teenage single mum higher status than a childless man like myself while incentivising the creation of yet more teenage single mums, so I added the educational criteria to tilt the balance back to a range of more long term pro-social outcomes (promoting stable relationships, increased fertility rates, parental responsibility/discipline). Totally unworkable in practice anyway as it would never get support, people would be anywhere between their 30s up to their 70s or even 80s before they were granted status.

Fight 10 different guys in a row, five minutes per round, with 5 minutes of rest in between each round.

It's a reasonable idea, definitely more feasible, but that's 100 minutes in total. By the 10th fresh opponent you'd be a sitting duck, especially if they're preparing/prepared for the same trial. Presumably the guys in question are your peers? Seems unfair to fight older or younger opponents. Then again maybe participating as one of a younger-than cohort of opponents would be good preparation and pre-qualification for the initiation and act to rebalance the advantages.

standardized tests that try to capture the would-be adults' actual understanding of the world and the implications of entering certain kinds of contracts and relationships

I think I would have understood enough on an intellectual level to have passed such a test at age 13 and then promptly spent the next ten years learning the same lessons the hard way. Analysing it at a remove isn't like knowing it in your bones the way you do after you've been through it, so I think the tests would have to embody a strong practical element somehow.

It's a reasonable idea, definitely more feasible, but that's 100 minutes in total. By the 10th fresh opponent you'd be a sitting duck, especially if they're preparing/prepared for the same trial.

In my mind, it's 10 opponents who have already qualified for 'adulthood' and thus know how to pull their punches and know exactly what it is like being on the other end of this treatment.

By the 10th fresh opponent you'd be a sitting duck, especially if they're preparing/prepared for the same trial.

Yes, and that is part of the point. To be exhausted, bruised, hurting (hopefully not actually injured) and barely able to move, and then to have to dig deep and fight on anyhow.

The lesson being that sometimes life is just not fair and when you don't want to go on, quitting is certainly an option (indeed, you can withdraw from the gauntlet at any time you want!) but it won't solve your problems and certainly won't be rewarded.

The difficulty is that making parenthood the benchmark is that it would accord a teenage single mum higher status than a childless man like myself while incentivising the creation of yet more teenage single mums, so I added the educational criteria to tilt the balance back to a range of more long term pro-social outcomes (promoting stable relationships, increased fertility rates, parental responsibility/discipline). Totally unworkable in practice anyway as it would never get support, people would be anywhere between their 30s up to their 70s or even 80s before they were granted status.

Yes, the policies would almost certainly have to be introduced as a full package of changes in order to work, and there will be second-order/unintended effects.

Just have to make it clear that the goal is more intact families and more well-developed children.

So, in your ideal society, instead of waiting till 18, to "become adult" everyone must pass some test, whether memorizing and parrotting some stuff, or Thunderdome fight?

So, when I do not qualify, when I just do not go to such tests or fail every time, I am permanent child, I am baby till I die?

This is not so bad. While you adults have to work, I can stay home and play video games and my parents have to care for me. You cannot throw a baby to the street, after all.

Looks rather awesome.

Playing games all life is boring? No problem. I join with my friends, all perma children like me, we go outside and have fun. When our fun gets us arrested? You cannot put us in prison, we are lil widdle babies!

Looks even more awesome.

This is general problem with all people who propose new laws and regulations, whose answer to every problem is: "There should be law" "This should be banned" - these people are generally law abiding and cannot imagine how criminals think, do not ever bother to think "how would criminal, whether simple street thug or smart scammer and con man, exploit this law and used it for his benefit".

Just have to make it clear that the goal is more intact families and more well-developed children.

Are people who enjoy fights and brawls, who are used to dishing and receiving beating, better and more responsible citizens with stronger families?

This just sounds like Russian army hazing but formalized. I'm not convinced that they'll be particularly inclined to do anything like "pull their punches". Instead, the average instinct is to get the new guy to suffer at least as much as you did, which naturally results in decreasing restraint over time.

Seems unfair to fight older or younger opponents.

Younger opponents it must be -- clearly you are not a real grownup if you have yet to find the secret of 'dad strength'.

The only real way to do something like this in the modern world seems to be mandatory military service, or something like it. Otherwise our lives are just far too devoid of any real suffering, especially the physical kind.

I do think that the Overton window could shift back enough towards responsibility in our lifetime to make mandatory military service a possibility. The best shot we have at getting Westerners back to some semblance of maturity is in my view instituting a sort-of UBI, but requiring 2 years of mandatory military service to obtain it.

With this system, if you're a criminal and poor or something, well you can either go to prison or go to the military. Tough luck if you don't want to.

Of course within that service there would have to be competence tests, physical trials, etc. but there are decent templates like South Korea. A commenter on an open thread in ACX here recently mentioned that in South Korea the TV dramas tend to have quite a common theme of older folks putting youngin's back in their place. We need more of that energy as well - Rob Henderson does a great job here of explaining how utterly ridiculous and backwards it is that adults now seek the validation of children. Even and especially in universities, where professors really should know better.

I don't like mandatory military service when there's always the risk that our troops could get plunged into a non-defensive foreign war and come back with the grievous injuries, PTSD, or worse.

So mandatory military service should HAVE to be paired with some serious skin in the game where if our leaders send out our troops to a conflict (even without a declaration of war) they have something personal on the line as well.

And I think that helps bring back the 'respect your elders' dynamic as well, if your elders have actually seen some shit and are just as tied to the fate of the nation as you are, and thus aren't trying to trick the young 'uns into dying for a worthless cause and pay a price the elders never had to pay or will have to pay.

So mandatory military service should HAVE to be paired with some serious skin in the game where if our leaders send out our troops to a conflict (even without a declaration of war) they have something personal on the line as well.

My personal belief is that if you advocate for a war you should immediately be assigned to fight on the front lines. If you're an old man who can't fight effectively? I don't care - if you think the war is good, you're going to be the one fighting it. Advocating for entering a war without being willing to fight in it yourself should be at the very least deeply shamed, if not criminalised.

That's a bad idea. No, a terrible one.

You'd actively sabotage the military, which I guess you're okay with. God forbid the country actually needs it for a defensive purpose.

More importantly, you're antagonizing the troops without actually addressing the incentives for leaders to pick fights, since they are already in. It'd be like the Roman Senate trying to handicap Caesar by sending him all their dissidents. What do you think happens next?

You'd actively sabotage the military, which I guess you're okay with.

The point of this is the chilling effect - I don't expect those old men to go and fight, I expect them to shut up and not advocate for other people to go die in order for them to be personally enriched. My belief is that advocating for other people to go die in order that you can profit off their sacrifice is such a moral wrong that the minor disadvantage of having the occasional octogenarian true believer playing a part on the battlefield is worth the cost. But that said, I could definitely agree to a compromise where people who advocate for a war that they cannot meaningfully fight in or support have to instead perform hazardous and dangerous support tasks back at home - what matters is that they have some skin in the game.

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Well, if we could somehow return to the legal status quo of the national guard not being deployed outside of the homeland, that would wrap things up rather nicely, yes?

In that case mandatory military service could be fulfilled without being sent on far flung imperialist adventures, and would be more like a militia / police force of last resort as was originally intended.

Professional army stays professional, the militia stays home and learns the basics of military affairs and life and kindly fucks off back to their normal civilian lives with a valuable skill set and shared cultural experience for life. Plus then they are actually around if serious shit pops off in the homeland.


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