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I've been thinking a lot recently about fundamental tensions, dualities, dialectics, how these map onto each other and relate to our societies, cultures, politics and secular cycles.
Bear with me a moment, I know this is abstract. But I think it provides a useful map for thinking about many issues, no matter which side you are on.
Consider a binary that we find very much in the news, culture and politics of the day, sex. Male-female is the binary, but there's a lot of definitional games being played. This binary is the poles of a fundamental tension, with a spectrum of related tensions in complicated combinations. But just think quickly on the issues of the day, and you can map that tension onto pretty much anything. In politics, which is “male” R or D? Hot or cold? Light or dark? Gay or straight? Drugs or prohibition? Guns or not? Notice the issues do not track cleanly, because both sides of any binary have a range of variability and expression for the same aspect. So, prohibition tracks female, which tracks D, but democrats generally support more drugs (but not tobacco). And male tracks R tracks guns, but prohibition on drugs, which tracks female. One side expresses their freedom in economics, the other in sex. One side demands order for the border, the other demands order in DC. Everyone is in tension, and so are our groups.
Thesis: This duality and how it resolves onto the issues of our day and the circumstances of our lives are a good descriptor for who we are, why we believe what we do, have the politics we have. I believe this helps us to understand why other people disagree with us, when we are clearly right about everything. The failure modes of these dualities explain the suffering experienced by the sentient in virtually all modes of life, no matter how objectively comfortable.
This extends to genetics itself (nature/nurture), primal forces (life/death, chaos/order, pleasure/suffering, violence/peace) and personal psychology and philosophy. It reaches into our very conceptions of these ideas, rationality vs irrationality.
Consider the subreddit AITA. What's the appeal here? It's weirdly attractive, tons of comments, shit flying everywhere. It allows people to see two "films" and argue for their conception. We have news silos because we are all practicing to do this. To see a situation and judge it by our lights, and then go forth to do battle with those on the opposing side. Goes for social media pile-ons and cancel culture, sports talk radio and small town gossip trains.
Hey there sportsfans, how about Coach Chucky? Is he a moron or what? Phone lines are open, call now.
Hey there Conservatives, how about this tranny reading to kids, whaddaya make of that shit? Isn't that weird and creepy? Donate money to me to keep telling you how nuts Liberals are!
Hey there Liberals, how about Current Republican having the same border policies as Previous Democrat? KIDS IN CagES!!!!!
The reality is that every duality has a fundamental legitimacy to it. Individuals have different ideas about exactly which values they hold on which scales of which issues.
Let's consider the two human archetypes by pole of duality. This is in no way determinative, as there is huge variation on most of these scales, but think of it very generally. You have male, nature, chaos, violence, irrationality, pain, greatness. And female, nurture, order, peace, rationality, pleasure, mediocrity.
These tensions need each other, as people need each other. Order decays, and is renewed by chaos. Male chaos is redirected by female order to more productive pursuits. Progressives come up with new ways to change society, Conservatives try to make sure it doesn't fuck up the good bits we already have. At this level of abstraction, conservative codes female, but politically that's not how it is currently, which is an interesting way of thinking about politics. The “feminine” politics of order are largely in the service of a “masculine” political project of trying out new shit. And the “male” embrace of inequality and freedom is channeled into the conservative project of slowing down the progs. The interactions are functionally infinite, so all this is descriptive rather than predictive. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and none of this means that these current realities are permanent in any way. But the tensions are.
Now let's put in some rudimentary statistics, and start making some basic assumptions that are certainly not 100% accurate, but should be a good descriptor of reality. Within each tension between two poles or archetypes is a bell curve of human behavior. It can be tall or short, but the poles of a tension are rare. Pure archetypes always are. Most people, psychology and behavior will cluster around the average value to some degree. What is true for IQ is true for violence, income, sex and number of offspring.
This begins to explain secular cycles, Freud, political organization and horseshoe theory. It explains why marginal members of groups are often the biggest cheerleaders. The most famous German nationalist was Austrian. Shaun King is white. The richest woman in the world is a dude. The first black president wasn't “black-black” (ADOS), and the first black president was Bill Clinton. Math is not without its ironies.
If it were the case that humans had a single nature, we should not expect cycles of any sort. We should simply solve our problems the most direct way and have a smooth path through history. We see nothing of the sort, but we do see a general tendency toward higher organization, larger civilizations etc. Think of the law of averages pushing this vast ocean of human duality relentlessly toward the middle. Order is winning, at least for now, but it contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, and we all know it. Hence the millenial cults of the Second Coming and Global Warming as the duelling apocalypses fueling the paranoid fringe of each political religion.
We all feel within us that this level of organization can't be sustained with the number of people we are producing, and that is going to mean a lot of death at some point. Malthus has been wrong for a long time, but the heat death of the universe is a long way off and he won't be forever. The popularity of the zombie movie is a social expression of the human connection to this fear. It is our fantasy that we'd be the ones to survive.
The reality is, the world isn't ending today and probably not tomorrow. We'll keep muddling along. We are the richest and most advanced we've ever been, more people are living more comfortable lives than any time before, and in fact in all the time before added together! And we're miserable as shit.
Our dual nature is oppressed by every temporary victory of one side. All order and the very real benefits it brings are at the cost of very real oppression. Freedom is dangerous, unequal and in general a bad bet. Yet it militates within us, furious and raging at the restrictions of our social lives. We feel an injustice in the randomness of the world, the pointlessness of all the suffering, the sheer cruelty of sentience in a cold and mechanical universe. What Dillard calls the “glut of pain”.
The problem with rationality is that it is death in the end. The math of the universe says that we are here to suffer until we die, and no amount of joy we steal from relentless time will last. Following our natural instincts to reproduce our genes will only bring more people into the world to suffer until they die. Once we lose all excuses for our suffering, we find that it was within us all the time. Transhumanists and wireheaders fantasize about bypassing suffering via drugs and technology. Religious gurus variously channel and redirect it. Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something. If you want to know why there is a loss of meaning, it is because we are running out of excuses to explain our psychic pain.
But for every pole is a competing and legitimate one. Life finds a way, hope springs eternal, it's just crazy enough to work. Any good game theorist can tell you that irrationality is rational at times. It is this that Camus refers to when he says that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not happy with his circumstance per se, but happy that he has his suffering laid out before him, and he is willing to meet it. In his punishment there is more time. The irrational search for another roll of the dice, a possible future, a chance at the gods. A revolt against death, against inevitability, against math itself. A sense that if we can hang in this game long enough, if we play our cards right and we get a bit lucky, we might someday escape this hellworld within our own skulls.
Yeah, that would be a giant waste of time, which is why I didn't do it.
So you have understood me!
Yes. The duality is within us. If you define things carefully and specifically enough, the dichotomy presents itself. A warm sun on a cold day is "female" because it is comforting and pleasurable, something we associate with the feminine, but hot, sweaty sun is more masculine and cool breeze and shade would be more "feminine" in that specific case. This is not about dogmatic categories, but explaining seemingly contradictory ideals.
Exactly. A functionally infinite set of interactions and influences.
Here we may disagree slightly, but it's definitional. I think it is explainable in terms of a confluence of tensions, and I think it is derivable by these methods, but that no one actually does it. This does not mean I think there is some deep essence to left or right, R or D, I merely use those because the tension between them is high and it allows us to see that as you say, there is no consistency in politics.
That's sort of the point. Take gun and drug legalization/restriction. This is a political issue, not a fundamental tension, but this can be seen in terms of different axes of tension. You have danger/safety, freedom/restriction, power/weakness, pain/pleasure, etc. Everyone looks at those issues, does their party affiliation thing and finds an explanation that satisfies them about why they think what they think. The "freedom" value is associated with the "danger", "power" and "pleasure" values here, which means that people who are really far out on the bell curve on the axis of "freedom" would probably scorn the danger and desire the pleasure and be in favor of both (i.e. libertarians). Everyone else is more toward the average of these tensions, and we get the muddy partial restriction of contemporary politics where certain guns and certain drugs are legal in certain circumstances.
Hilariously, you seem to have almost perfectly misunderstood. There is no shared symbolic content for political groups, that's the whole point. All sides have all the binaries, in infinitely complex combinations. Society, the world, international politics is so fiendishly complex because of these interactions, because every binary contains a million different binaries. Countries, corporations, cities, parties, people are not one thing. "I tried to draw the line, but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time".
Yes and no. Yes there are many factions, and in part this whole little shitpost is about how infinite and varied those factions can be. But I think there are always two sides, made up of those many, many interest groups with their own specific combination of beliefs and interests in constantly shifting coalitions with only two real sides. Roman politics had millions of shifts, reversals, revolutions and coups, but the optimates and the populares, the greens and blues. There is a binary there.
Conflict does not end, it only moves, because the tension is fundamental. When one side of a binary that became political or social "wins", what happens? Where does that tension go? Do all the constituent interests, powers, parties and people just evaporate? Impossible. The conflict just moves. After war, conflict moves into politics, war being the continuation of politics by violent means, and peace being the continuation of war by nonviolent means. Germany won a hegemony over continental Europe in peace much more effectively than they ever did in war.
The various interest groups split into constituent parts and vie for power within that binary before reconstituting with other groups in a new political reality. If one group "wins" at something, they usually split into a new binary and one side will ally with the losers from the previous conflict. So the pre-civil war national binary was slave/free, north/south, east/west. When the south seceded, the national binary was then pro-war Republicans and pro-peace Democrats. When the south lost and was reintegrated, the losing faction from the war years re-allied with the south.
Political coalitions are inherently unstable and given to shedding marginal members. The more one side wins, the more the important contest is internal. Think one-party elections where the nomination is the real contest. The more power one side of a political binary gains, the more important their internal divisions are. If one political group destabilizes the interparty binary, they will be split by the resulting tension, new coalitions will emerge and the two-party binary will return in full effect.
This can be expressed in multiple parties, or only within one party. But there will always be a fundamental division within every group.
From the subatomic to the international.
Everything is conflict.
Dillard says that death is spinning the globe, but she shaded it. She read Heisenberg. She turned back at the pass.
Math is spinning the globe, and death is just part of it. All values resolve to zero eventually.
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You correctly note that this is descriptive, and not prescriptive. That the data is noisy and the correlations poor—not that correlation implies causation, anyway. For a given issue it is easy to find counterexamples, or even imagine an alternate history where the constituencies might have been reversed.
Shouldn’t this be evidence against the proposed dichotomy?
Suppose a third category, neuter, defined by compromise positions. Neither nature nor nurture but natural law. Rejecting both autocracy and chaos in favor of mediated decision-making. The role in your gender analogy is obvious. It is the synthesis to this dialectic. After all, the poles of a tension are rare.
This category rejects duality in favor of a triality. What if we posit another category, one that rejects all three? Meta-compromise, or perhaps meta-skepticism. Then—then—
By induction, we end up with an arbitrarily large set of skeptic positions. An infinity of signaling and countersignaling. I think this model better reflects human interaction than any proposed duality. For any sufficiently entrenched set of positions, there is alpha in claiming another level of sophistication.
Not really, in fact explaining why constituencies reverse is part of the allure here.
If you're interested, give me an example and I'll see if we can walk through it.
In this taxonomy, the poles are theoretical, like the width of a line in geometry. Compromise positions are where we all are, stuck in a million tensions, being pulled off our center. What you call neuter I call synthesis, reality. No one is 100% one thing. No one is perfectly free, or perfectly unfree. We all exist as many contradictions in uneasy compromise with all the others.
Then what does it buy us?
At best, you’ve applied Principal Component Analysis to sociology. But correlation still isn’t causation, and just because you can model a position as a linear combination of some axes doesn’t imply they are meaningful.
It buys us a model of the world as conflict theory and a more realistic expectation of what progress and success should look like.
And a simple yet infinitely recursive method of disentangling issues into component dialectics.
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tbh this post and parts of its replies almost deserve a minor mention in the 'ways smart people can be very confused' museum that hosts greats like Weininger, Hegel, and Berkeley. Hopefully miy reply doesn't!
Conflicts over categories aren't driven by the existence of categories, categories are just rough labels or ideas people have that are useful to their ends, and said categories pop up and conflicts occur over them over those nebulous, fractal, and contingent ends. Republicans aren't republicans because they're polarizing around R vs D, they are so because of the atoms hitting other atoms, which at our scale occurs in thousands of different rough patterns, some of which are 'reacting to increases in crime and homelessness', 'noticing many surrounding them are failing relative to traditional religious morality', etc. Given that complexity, it's difficult to make any claims about the way such conflicts unfold that don't reference said underlying causes at all.
Not really sure what you're arguing tbh, but I think a direct refutation of it is that (and this comes from the intuition that these 'poles' are more casual terms than they are fundamental) of two poles, often one just wins. Organized christian religious institutions as a political force behind history lost to democratic, modern politics. Horse-drawn carriages for practical transportation lost to cars, swords lost to guns, etc. There's no root causes in conflict between 'poles', just the laws of physics and the complexities of human interests and contingencies acting through them.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me, I'm talking about human nature and you're talking about technology. The fundamental tensions I'm talking about map onto these technological, social and political issues and innovations in unpredictable ways.
Politics may have defeated Christianity, but that wasn't a fundamental tension, politics and religion coexisted for millenia before, and will again. The tension there would be between the moralistic and materialistic human urges. So politics defeats a religion, but it becomes a religion in the process, thereby maintaining the duality. Even atheists need a god and a heaven, even if god is the president and heaven is "gay luxury space communism". This is the tension that destroys materialistic politics, it's why communism never worked and became a cult. It just couldn't get over the god-shaped hole. Politically, this tension gets generalized as "church and state", and it is generally understood today that separating the two is better for both. Render unto the one pole the things that are Caesar's and to the other, the things that are God's.
At sufficient levels of abstraction, some good advice.
Many more than this, I think. My point, somewhat garbled perhaps, is not that any group has some eternal essence, much the opposite. We all have the same conflicts within us, these are so numerous and interact in such complex ways that there's no predicting how they'll map onto the future. But if one digs into an issue long enough and defines the terms carefully enough, the basic tensions usually present themselves quickly.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No it doesn’t, it suggests blacks should either fix their culture or use white culture.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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/
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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.
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".
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'.
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.
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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.
There are methods of obtaining education that do not depend on property taxes. For example,
income-based repaymentincome-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
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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:
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
From a libertarian perspective, why does the State get to teach kids anyways?
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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.
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.
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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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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.
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.)
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.
defunding transition therapy: it's against liberty to ban cosmetic surgery, but it's up to society what society pays for.
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.
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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
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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.
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!
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
Younger opponents it must be -- clearly you are not a real grownup if you have yet to find the secret of 'dad strength'.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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".
Are people who enjoy fights and brawls, who are used to dishing and receiving beating, better and more responsible citizens with stronger families?
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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.
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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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?
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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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 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.
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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 left hates the US, 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Along with having their assets illegally stolen, blockades and sanctions.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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:
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The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
We've discussed similar concepts in the old place some years back, under the term "distributed motte and bailey". The basic problem is that while it's pretty obviously a thing and quite pernicious, there's pretty much zero way to discuss it productively across the divide. Even if one were to recognize that people on their side were using such a tactic, there's nothing they can do about it other than to maybe abandon their side over an argument of principle... which is not going to happen.
Seeing the larger pattern was one of those things that inclined me toward pessimism about the potential outcomes of the Culture War.
They can 1) admit the other guys are crazy and 2) answer the question "how is my side winning not going to give the crazies influence?" If they can't answer that, especially #2, then yeah there's nothing they can do about it, but sometimes there is nothing you can do about it, and recognizing that is just recognizing the truth.
There's also a difference between "there are crazies on my side" and "the crazies on my side are the ones with influence", especially when the news media sees the former and pretends it's the latter because it doesn't like you.
All valid points. It seems in principle like it ought to be possible to come to some sort of understanding, some productive arrangement.
Remember Gamergate? The Gamergaters in the motte were actively, desperately attempting to sever any connection to the bailey, individually and as groups. The other side simply refused focused on whatever connection could be asserted, and studiously ignored all efforts to the contrary. As you note, if they don't like you, they don't have to play fair.
And this is where the despair sets in. Figuring out what's happening isn't hard, if you pay attention and work at being honest with yourself, which is to say that it's far beyond the ability of most people. But even if you can actually figure out what's happening, you are an individual, and the forces in operation are not individual forces. Someone on the other side, posessed of different values, has approximately zero incentive to recognize your diagnosis of the problem as valid. Reason is too loose, evidence too loose, too many degrees of freedom to pin the situation down into something reliably communicable.
Groups are made up of individuals. Being a morally upright individual is the key here. If you're a model for others, they may choose to follow in your footsteps.
Giving up the individual responsibility of being a good person is why we're in this mess in the first place.
There's a difference between demanding that silent people speak out and demanding that people who are already speaking out be careful about whom they are speaking out for.
I'd never demand that silent people speak out, for exactly the reason you describe, short of extreme situations like people being gunned down in front of them, and maybe not even then (abortion opponents think they are seeing the equivalent of babies being gunned down, but I don't want them to speak out).
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Who creates these systems that set up incentives? Beings from another plane? No, humans do. The point I'm trying to make is that at some level it all comes back to individual responsibility. We need strong, moral people in order to take power and build better systems, if that's what you see as important.
This sort of thing isn't inevitable, and it's frustrating as hell to always see everyone here arguing that it's basically done and dusted. That pessimism is another major reason things are in the shitter.
There's people, and then there's the Things made of the spaces between people: Moloch and other egregores. If your plans involve assuming that the egregores don't exist and people are all you need to plan for, you are going to be very surprised at how things work out.
So no, humans do not have mastery over the incentives. They can in limited circumstances nudge those incentives, sometimes. That's about as good as it gets.
Do you recognize that communal responsibility exists as well?
We do, but if the strong, moral people don't actually take power and build better systems, together, those systems won't happen.
Communal responsibility and egregores absolutely exist, and are important to factor in. However if we want to tackle those problems, then yes we need moral people to band together and build systems together.
Another way to phrase what I'm getting at is that it seems to me we have a lack of capable, moral people, especially young men, who are able to band together and build these systems. Could be a coordination problem, or a supply problem.
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"You can't thicken up a pitcher of spit with a handful of buckshot."
Being a morally upright individual is good and necessary for its own reasons, but it's not a solution to social collapse or degradation. Something beyond individual morality is required for that. The "responsibility of being a good person" that was given up on was never an individual responsibility, but a communal one; the purely individual responsibility is is there in exactly the same way it always was. Pretending that this responsibility could be reduced to a purely individual matter is exactly how it was given up. Woke goes the way it goes because for all its madness, it is at least an attempt at restoring some form of public responsibility, which is why it has beat atomic individualism so thoroughly: people recognize that such responsibility is necessary, and lacking.
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This is true, but it's true no matter what you do. There are a lot of things that bad faith people on the other side can distort whether you give the crazies any influence or whether you have any crazies at all. If they want, they can just make up some crazies or otherwise lie.
My point is exactly that, as an explanation for why people on the other side who I think should listen to the OP's critique won't. They don't believe the criticism is made in good faith, and they arrive at that conclusion by exactly the logic you've just stated.
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I'm not doing #1 in every argument that pattern matches for this phenomena. It's not rhetorically viable for one, and for two it's also just an annoying argument to have every time.
If someone cries "sanewashing!" every time I try to talk about how " isn't that bad, actually" I would rather jump off a cliff.
Because then you have to walk back over and do a bunch of retarded rigor checks on what would be sane, what isn't, and re-establish all the premises from scratch, just because someone goes meta with their argument. It's bullshit.
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I have my views. I'm not going to apologize for the meanest loons who hold opinions adjacent to mine. I'm certainly not going to ideologically retreat just because a bad person holds views adjacent to mine.
Naturally. but you (or I) can derive benefit from adjacent loons, and can slow-roll cooperation against them, while maintaining plausible deniability. In fact, doing so offers immediate, obvious advantages, while policing the loons is much cost for little benefit. There doesn't seem to be a way to solve this, and the result is to make trust across the divide more costly than it otherwise should be. And at some point, the cost is too high.
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So you begin by acknowledging and distancing yourself from people on your side of the debate that seem hateful, then immediately turn around and accuse your wife of sane-washing when she does the same? Holy Russell's conjugation, Batman!
I have pure motives, unrelated to those on my side who are motivated by hate.
You are sane-washing the haters on your side.
He is a hater lying about his motivations.
yes we can all play that game. There is plently to criticize about the fat-acceptance movement, but pinning them as the side more prone to being motivated by hate / disgust is just lulz. I am sympathetic to an argument that hate of the person has nothing to do with it / one side is objectively correct / detraction is the appropriate response to unhealthiness, even if it's expression should be tempered etc / that shame can be a powerful way of patrolling unhealthy social contagions, etc. But the frame that it's the other side who is hate-filled is more DOA than Dems are the real racist type of rhetoric
Those people aren't on my side. That's a separate party, the group of people who hate fat people. I'm not a part of that group of people, and I dislike and disavow that group of people. Whereas my wife would say that she does feel that the fat acceptance movement is a fundamentally good thing, that she does like, and she would not disavow them. There's the big difference.
You're just cleaving 'sides' conveniently. By your description, your wife described the positive aspects of fat acceptance. You only want to be associated with the positive aspects of fat-detraction. Neither is truly a 'side' in any ontological sense, but you're just throwing in a biased gerrymander to accuse your wife of sane-washing.
Calling the fat acceptance movement hate-filled, is just an ineffective "Democrats are the real racists". It might be objectively true under carefully drawn definitions of the central word, but you've just engaged in word-thinking.
This sounds like an isolated demand for rigor.
No I don't. I don't think there's much positive to fat-detraction, and I generally dislike fat-detraction entirely, pretty strongly. I know there are hate-filled people who hate fat people. I dislike them greatly. That doesn't mean that the hate-filled fat acceptance movement people are any better, or are suddenly noble. I despise those squeaky wheel social movements who try to shame everyone around them.
You can tell how hate-filled they are from how much you hate them!
These guys too. Why would you hate them so much unless they were filled with hate?
Wait a second...
Well, for whatever it's worth, I've always been someone who hates people who hate other people for hating people. That's just the way I am. I'm a 3rd order hater. I guess I feel like the proper response to dealing with bigots is to admonish them, but try to do better yourself, not to debase yourself like they do, and not to play the victim.
I take it you have the common decency of hating yourself, bigot that you are?
Maybe you should walk away from this meta nonsense and do what everyone does: love the righteous, hate the wicked and admit to yourself that you actually have first order principles instead of postmodern aloofness.
Which would be what, exactly?
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This is a phrase always and everywhere used to disguise the casting of moral judgement.
So you think that there is no human ever that has actually stopped casting moral judgment?
I would generally say that ceasing moral judgments is only possible at a significant remove. Some of us can be detached about things that happened a few years ago, some longer, some can never detach themselves from moral judgment.
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I think you'd have to be basically Buddha to stop doing that. Every snap emotional impression - every "eww" or "woah!" - is a miniature moral judgment; deeming something good/beautiful/impressive or bad/repulsive/piddling.
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I think that. 99% of the time when a person complains "Becky is so judgemental" they mean "Becky routinely expresses judgements I don't endorse" as opposed to "Becky expresses judgements at all".
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I mean name one. Morality is a core part of human psychology, people use moral intuitions to reason about the world even on an unconscious level. Even this idea that one shouldn't judge is just care/harm rearing it's ugly head again.
Unless you're in a coma or something it seems literally impossible.
Jesus Christ. ;)
Perhaps if you take an extremely broad sense of 'judgment' sure. But I absolutely believe there have been many enlightened figures over human history that have been able to suspend the vast majority of judgment.
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As discussed in the previous thread, I agree that having hate for fat people is a bad thing. I also think it's pretty uncommon and hardly the point. When people talk about "fat hatred", what they're typically talking about is things like people being pissed off that they have to sit next to someone on a plane that's spilling into their seat. The claim that we "should treat them poorly" is also doing too much work - what exactly is meant here? Sure, don't just randomly be a jerk to a fat person for no particular reason, all good and agreed. Are people obligated to feign attraction to them? Aside from just literally not being rude to people for no evident reason, I'm unclear what the expected standard of treatment is that people feel isn't typically met.
I think it boils down to ‘fat women feel ugly(because they are) and want all of society to feel an obligation to fix their emotions’. So yes, people are obligated to feign attraction to them in a fat acceptance activists ideal world.
Of course, the way this is framed is that heterosexual males are simply conditioned to think they find women of a healthy weight more attractive than overweight or obese women, and if we were able to remove the "toxic beauty standards" propagated by social media and the fashion and entertainment industries, straight men would instantly be deprogrammed and realise that of course they find Lizzo hotter than Emily Ratajkowski, and how could they ever have been so stupid as to believe otherwise! In this obese utopia, there would be no "feigning" of attraction.
There's a grain of truth in this observation to the extent that social contagion plays some role in what people find attractive (e.g. Hollywood actress starts wearing her hair in hairstyle, men start finding women who wear their hair in that style attractive). But the sad reality for fat acceptance
activistsslacktivists* is that many if not most of the traits to which straight men are attracted don't seem to be culturally bound at all, because they are obvious proxies for genetic fitness and fertility, and this is true even of cultures which have never been exposed to the "toxic beauty standards" of white capitalist cisheteropatriarchy (e.g. African villages without a TV or internet connection to be found). Find me a culture in which most straight men find 40-year-old women more attractive than 20-year-old women (all else being equal), or in which the hourglass figure is widely seen as repellent, or in which facial asymmetry is seen as more desirable than facial symmetry, or in which women who are so emaciated that they've stopped menstruating are highly prized - then we can talk about how straight men's distaste for obese women is a "Western social construct".You'll also notice that the traits which fat acceptance activists themselves find attractive in men are mysteriously exempt from having been conditioned into them by these toxic Western beauty standards they so loudly decry. The only reason the tall, lean gymrat next door doesn't want to fuck you is because he's been brainwashed into false consciousness; but the reason you want to fuck him is because he's just ever so dreamy. Awfully convenient, isn't it?
If I sound contemptuous of these people and their self-serving motivated reasoning - well, I am. More than anything I'm infuriated by the scorn with which sexually frustrated men are treated, while sexually frustrated women can land themselves cushy academic jobs in which they get paid six figures to whine about how sexually frustrated they are for reasons entirely within their power to change.
*The noun "activist" presupposes that you are active, which the obese aren't by definition.
I mean there's a grain of truth in that modern American beauty standards are a bit less porky than what men would prefer. But that some tribe in Timbuktu considers it high status for women to look like walmart landwhales is no more evidence of men secretly preferring that than Chinese beauty standards being borderline anorexic is for men preferring the concentration camp survivor look.
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It's more that normal people - both for logistics/convenience reasons and instinctive judgements of appearance - don't want to date fat people, don't really want to be friends with them, don't even want to look at them. This is a very unpleasant situation to be in. The analogies to other forms of 'exclusion', e.g. for minorities, aren't entirely without merit! It's just that the solution should be for the obese people to lose weight, by whatever means, rather than create acceptance. It simply is not technically difficult to take in fewer calories, and if an individual can't muster the will to do so themselves (although that itself is terrible), they should be assisted.
There's an obvious rhetorical claim (that is fundamentally misguided imo because the mental health memeplex is also bad) comparing obesity to self-harm and anorexia. We don't tie 'lack of stigma' for self-harm and anorexia to suggestions that it's fine to continue doing those things, we instead treat them.
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Sorry I expressed that quite poorly, I was speaking in terms of actions / revealed preference, and not as one big thing, just a bunch of small things, death by a thousand cuts, the 'halo effect' of attractive people multiplied and reversed. The kinds of looks you get change, people are less enthusiastic about interacting with you and reach out less, etc. You won't have no friends, but you will feel the difference. Explicit mocking of fat people isn't that uncommon in certain spaces, but it's not really what I meant.
Wasn't attributing it to myself! Interesting to talk to and appearance have no inherent correlation, plenty of really smart people have been ugly / fat in the past. Although today there is a strong correlation for cultural reasons I mentioned elsewhere (young upper-class people aren't fat)
Eh. "You shouldn't shoplift not because you'll go to jail, but because our people have a common interest in prosperity upheld by free transactions among people with property rights and stealing undermines that". "You should dress nice and have good hygiene, not because people will like you less if you dress poorly and smell bad, but because healthy skin is valuable and society having a good aesthetic is morally important". For quite a few people that's not why they do those things. The cause of much prosocial behavior among random people just is coercion and shame, and even if it's unfortunate (and has many bad side-effects), it clearly works, and that mechanism probably wouldn't exist if everyone was able to do everything for the right reasons.
That part of my comment was more motivated by - trying to paint a vibe of why the fat acceptance movement exists and what they're fighting from a sympathetic position. So on the one hand, i guess i succeeded? On the other hand, I might have painted a misleading picture.
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Absolutely. If you're in an elite circle, your friends and the people who you visibly spend a lot of time with can have a huge impact on your reputation. At the same time, being obese just automatically imposes negative consequences on your friends - you require more food, you are less physically capable in a way that rules out vast swathes of physical and social activities and you have to be specially accounted for in a huge variety of ways. When you are fat you actually do place a substantial burden on the rest of your friends (if they aren't as fat as you already) and while people are generally nice and will accommodate a more rotund friend, they would prefer it if their friends were all in shape.
It's important to keep the spectrum in mind here. I have friends who are 'overweight', they can hang out fine, maybe they're out of shape and can't go on a hike or whatever, that's not really an issue. Getting into obese, logistics becomes more of an issue, but appearance is still more of a factor than that imo. Morbid obesity would rule someone out of social activity among 'elite' or even many normal circles both for social and logistical reasons, I think, but it's not really an issue as 'we' never encounter those people anyway, ssc different worlds. Morbid obesity is 9% of the US population, though!
Being slightly overweight is not a particularly big deal. I was using obese as the dividing point under the assumption that obesity is where you start getting real and serious limitations due to your weight. Morbid obesity is a whole other kettle of fish - but at the same time my objections apply even more strongly to the morbidly obese than regular obese people. What kind of social life can you possibly have in an existence like that?
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You're free to simply not care about your reputation, but this doesn't mean you get to ignore the consequences of it. Having a bad or low-status reputation has a direct and serious impact on your life in countless ways, and while I would agree that too much importance is placed on those social games, they remain both important and relevant at every level of society - the elite qualifier was placed there because if you're one of the obese people living in the trailer park you don't actually care that your neighbour is just as fat as you are.
Subculture matters more than class here, in my opinion. But even then, obesity prevents you from participating in a huge range of extremely popular and rewarding activities of all kinds - social, leisure, commercial, artistic, religious etc. I personally do not want to be close friends with obese people because they are going to be unable to participate in huge numbers of social bonding activities that I regularly take part in and enjoy - I don't think going for a long walk to have a beautiful picnic under the stars in a national park is particularly class-related, but it absolutely is something you don't get to do if you're obese! At the same time, I don't want to have to make a decision between an activity me and my friends want to do, and a less satisfying compromise that we have to take because Cletus is just too fat to participate and we don't want to make him feel awkward.
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You should never have your opinion changed by one conversation. Claiming to have your opinion changed in the opposite direction by a conversation is just a "gotcha", and if truthful is just as stupid as having your opinion changed in the direction that your opponent wants. Once you've researched it a bit, determined that you don't need to fall victim to epistemic learned helplessness, and read rebuttals to the argument that convinced you and still determined that you think it's a good argument, then you can start changing your mind.
I must also wonder what you think about people who have poor hygeine instead of fat people. By your reasoning, you should not care about hanging around with people who have poor personal hygeine.
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Moral uprightness? I'm legitimately surprised that you're a Christian, because the bible actually has a few things to say about fat people!
So not exactly a positive appraisal - gluttony is generally considered to be a major sin, but the bible goes even further and suggests that being friends with fat people actually disgraces your father. There's direct biblical support for fat shaming, and while that quote comes from the old testament the new isn't any kinder to the gluttons and still considers it a major sin. Being obese and not doing anything about it means that you are sinning unrepentantly, and people are actually being good Christians when they shame you and try to get you to change. That said, in the interest of being honest and forthright, I feel compelled to note that I'm not a Christian myself - The Antichrist and the Genealogy of Morals were far too compelling and I haven't even seen any Christian apologetics that try to grapple with them. I was one once however, and I still know enough about the faith to understand that it generally recommends against sinning, and it really doesn't like when you're actually proud of your sin and demand that other people accept it. The same kind of social shaming that you're railing against actually comes directly from your own religion, and when you say "I'm not okay with people having a bad reputation because they are fat." you are directly contradicting the word of God and elevating your own judgement above his while encouraging people to sin more. Personally I think that's a good thing and I'm happy that you feel this way, but at the same time I believe Christianity has a few things to say about thinking that you know better than God about what's right and wrong.
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Can only speak for myself, but when I meet a person who's not just fat (hell, going by BMI I'm technically overweight and have a fairly noticeable beer belly) but actually morbidly obese, my instinctive reaction is disgust. I'm not proud of it, but there it is. I see no reason to think that this instinctive reaction is ever going away, nor even that it should. Of course I still go out of my way to treat morbidly obese people with respect and good manners, but my knee-jerk reaction is disgust.
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Many of my activities are about hiking/cycling and similar activities. I would not go on a walk across city with someone incapable of walking for few hours.
That it is not about complete exclusion, but more of feasibility. And I would put significant effort to help someone on say wheelchair or with serious disease but I am less willing to invest effort to help someone eating themself to death.
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That is absolutely not how I experience life and I struggle with getting my BMI under 35. Yeah dating is shittier, but everywhere else it is totally ok.
Hm. I clarified in another response I didn't literally mean no friends, but did you not have a general sense that being fat was something other people looked down on you for, outside dating, people were less interested in being friends with you? Interesting to compare this to other replies below saying they would exclude obese people.
What class/kind of social circles did you have? Maybe it's more accepted in areas that have more obese people?
Absolutely have not found such thing, and actually my country is still on the thin side. I have friends from working to upper class. On the other hand I think that there is fat and American fat (the guys and gals that look all balloon-ish). I am also not the most charismatic or extrovert person. Of course I have to earn my acceptance, but for men this is the default mode anyway.
I think that if this phenomena exist they are more of expression of American cultural zealotry.
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I’ve never considered either side of the debate “hatred”. I don’t hate fat people or lazy people or whatever other outgroup we’re talking about. My issue on a lot of this is about normalization — that the movement in question is encouraging society to treat as normal and neutral things that are generally harmful either to the people in question or the larger society. I don’t think problems get solved by pretending they don’t exist. We have a lot of these kinds problems. We have a lot of people who are too poorly educated to really understand and interact with modern society. We have people who have been made so emotionally fragile that they find coping with things not going their way is impossible for them.
I agree that in most subjects and movements there’s a pop-version of the main subject. Even for religion, there’s the high version people learn in official ministerial training full of very complicated theology, theodicy, and cosmology. Then there’s the pop-religion where not only are the ideas vastly simplified, some pop beliefs tend to contradict the official dogmas of the religion.
I'm not sure how seriously to take this post. It smells like satire.
People starving in the third world are starving because food (which is produced and sent to them in abundance) is not efficiently distributed, largely because of the political and military instability of those places (i.e., corrupt governments, warlords, tribal conflict, etc.). It's not because fat white first worlders are hoarding all the calories.
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I guess you might be trolling, but if you're not...
You know that 'white' and 'rich' are not synonyms right? East Asians are wealthier than Europeans in (more or less) every country inhabited by both groups.
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Not a defense of 'fat acceptance', but by normalization I think you mean positive acceptance? Obesity is, in any objective sense, normal in many communities in the United States.
Arguably obesity needs ... not necessarily more shame, it was and still is incredibly shameful in the eyes of most. I think a combination of explicit coercion, both towards the obese and towards those who create the conditions that lead to it (i.e. those who sell the food), is justified.
One of the arguments of the fat acceptance people is that shame doesn't work. Being fat isn't exactly desirable in our society, and they regularly get badgered to lose weight by doctors and skinny relatives. The whole point of the fat acceptance movement is to remove what they see as an unfair stigma.
I think different, more potent and coercion-adjacent flavors of shaming (more common in the past?) would be more effective than shame is today, so I don't want to say 'shame doesn't work', but it's true that the very real shame a fat person would feel today or a few decades ago didn't work. But your local grocer or mcdonalds refusing to sell you triple-decker burgers because you're 350lbs (or just not stocking the product at all) might!
Also, whatever the mechanisms, many young and higher-class subcultures in americans have managed to mostly eliminate obesity among their ranks. I don't think this is mostly just by selection, and, while higher IQ and other values do contribute, I don't think you need to be 115+ iq to prevent yourself from being obese. Maybe those values will diffuse?
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It does work for some people, you can definitely find cases of people losing the weight, and they often frame their motivation in terms of self-image and shame.
A lot of relatively skinny people I know regularly shame themselves if they start to get a little fat. I’d almost say everyone does that whose skinny or fit.
I started feeling self conscious after hitting a BMI just a little under 24 (and immediately worked to drop it back down to the 22-23 range), it makes it difficult for me to even imagine how the morbidly obese can live with themselves.
It sucks. You know what makes suck-y feelings go away, at least for a little while? Delicious unhealthy foods. Not trying to justify it, just explaining the vicious cycle.
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Seconding this. I'm not particularly skinny but I'm not overweight either. However if my weight goes above my ideal target by more than 1kg I immediately tell my self "cut down on your eating" multiple times a day whenever I make food related choices.
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I can confirm that. As soon as you can look in the mirror and flex something you get this boost of motivation to improve your shape. I think it's much harder for obese people to get motivated, because going from 82 down to 72kg means your looks actually improve, but going from 160kg down to 140kg, that is, losing twice as much weight, might improve your quality of life (like, being able to wipe your own ass), but the person in the mirror is not that different: he's the same disgustingly fat person, just with some extra skin folds. Most people can't stay motivated simply by shame and the number going down for long enough.
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I felt pretty gross at 90+ kg. Not that I don't have body issues at sub-80 too.
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I'm a (comparative) walrus, and let me tell you, I also shame myself. I avoid mirrors, going out, clothes shopping, and photographs, because just seeing my face makes my gorge rise.
The problem is that the shame turns into a ball of self-hatred and impotent rage in my gut and does not effectively spur me to take effective action; feeling bad about myself makes me more likely to turn to unhealthy foods for a hedonic bump-up, rather than hedonically-unsatisfying but long-term productive things like home cooking (yes I know home cooking can be delicious but I do not derive joy from the process and am currently marginally unskilled, so there's a learning curve that needs to be overcome) and exercise (which is painful, sweaty, and only reminds me how much less capable my body is now than it used to be).
Instead of shame, I need to find an emotional motivator which is a more effective spur to action rather than just recrimination.
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It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.
Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.
What? Human bodies are not excempt from the laws of thermodynamics. If you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight. Period. And you won't gain weight if you don't put more calories in than you burn. You have to actively do something in order to stay or become obese.
Now, is weight-loss extremely hard psychologically? Oh, absolutely. My own weight struggles can attest to that and I'm not even obese.
But it isn't weight-loss that's impossible. It's getting people to not overeat that's impossible. Two very different things. To pretend they're identical is irresponsible.
Unless you're Eliezer, in which case diet and exercise are without value.
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If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
Really?
It is not even per person. It is not compared with total callories change. Not compared with say sugar production.
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It's important because the message is wrong-headed. Telling people that there is nothing they can do when there definitely are very simple things they can do (move more, eat less) is cruel because it leaves people to their misery.
Also, I don't see how it's necessarily wrong to cast some moral judgement on fat people. It doesn't mean I suddenly cast them out of the circle of persons who should be afforded curtesy, respect or dignity. It means I disapprove of behaviour that is harmful to themselves and others. I also disapprove when someone smokes indoors or farts in an elevator. And that disapproval might actually motivate them to break the cycle.
I know that our culture has elevated enabling people with all sorts of miscalibrated habits to a twisted virtue, but being nice and doing the right thing aren't always identical.
Very interesting. Are there any studies with a larger cohort?
It is eminently possible. Eat fewer calories than you consume. If your point is that it's impossible to maintain unhealthy eating and exercise regimens without becoming fat, then you're right. But there is no law of nature that says you have to stuff your face. Your argument about drastically reduced metabolism after increased physical activity is interesting, but I'll have to see more evidence.
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Obesity is defined as being above the threshold of a BMI of 30. Imagine a population where currently everyone has a BMI of 25, but it starts to increase by 1 every year from now. What would the corresponding graph like the one you linked look like? It would be 5 years of no change, until in year x+5 obesity "explodes" to 100%, despite the fact that the actual causal trend has been going on linearly for 5 years!
If we look at actual weight itself to avoid thresholding effects like I described above, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the 70s at all, they're right on trend. There's other data like discussed in this that indicate that the surge in weight had already begun around WWI, subsided a bit around the Great Depression and accelerated again in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
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I know multiple people personally who have lost weight in the long term, and I myself am sitting quite stably at about 15kg below my peak weight (though I will probably try to gain weight again soon). The notion that it's impossible is just ludicrous.
I will say that I think some very morbidly obese individuals have permanently wrecked their body's ability to regulate hunger and weight. I give credit to their tales of constant, unbearable hunger and strict dieting for slow results. But such people are still the minority, and their situation is still ultimately the result of their decisions.
I agree that the obesity crisis is not a result of a sudden decline in morals, and I've said the same thing myself. And yet, it is a moral crisis. Changes in technology cannot be blamed here. Just as the opportunity to steal separates thieves from honest men, the opportunity to overeat reveals the gluttons among us. The refusal to engage morally with this issue is tying people into knots, forcing them to insist that weight loss is impossible or to search for villains in the hecking sneed oil, because otherwise people would be responsible for themselves. And you know what, if Linda wants to eat ice cream and Harry wants to drink beer, go ahead. It's not important to me that everyone looks like a model. But it's sad, frankly, when people tell themselves that they can never lose weight. Because some of them will believe it.
Yet curiously, their gluttony disappears when sth like Tirzepatide is introduced into their bodies.
I could lose lots of weight - even without modern drugs. The thing is, it's like holding your breath. With additional effects like your thought process being regularly hijacked to think not just about eating, but even stuff related to eating (it's pretty bizarre). Eventually you will be compelled to stop. And then overeat until you reach your initial weight. And then maintain it. Almost as if it's not about random whims made at the time ("I want this ice cream now"), but organism attempting to maintain homeostasis (and not caring that its idea of homeostatic amount of fat is unhealthy).
With Tirzepatide, I went down from about 103kg IIRC, to 84-ish (and I still continue to lose weight). Without any suffering. It's laughable that some non-fat people think they're virtuously eating less than they actually want to eat.
I don't find anything specifically virtuous about my own losing weight. In fact I sometimes worry that it's wrong for me to do so because I find it quite easy.
Yes, if you are given a moral choice and choose wrong, it is your responsibility, not the fault of society for giving you the wrong meds, or for making ice cream that tastes too good. Weight gain is not some biological inevitability. People a hundred years ago did not find their homeostasis point at gaining 2lbs every year. Not because of morality, but because of lifestyle and diet habits that are quite in reach for the average person today.
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This argument is simply untrue. I would eat far more and be fat if I would not be ashamed of being (potentially) fat. Another big factor is health impact, and more extreme fat deniers deny also health dangers ("healthy at any size" insanity)
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This really strikes me as wishful thinking. Richard Hanania made the comparison with smoking. In the West, the rate of smoking has plummeted since the 1960s. I'm sure raising awareness of the dangers associated with the smoking played a significant part of that, but I don't think anyone can really deny that a major cause of this shift was simply social: smoking has more widely come to be seen as a filthy habit, which imposes a social cost on those who choose to do it. In much of the world it's illegal to advertise tobacco products, and legislation or local rules make it less convenient to do so.
If obesity was a truly immutable trait, criticising a fat person for being fat would be like criticising an amputee for having one leg. Fat acceptance activists are incentivised to downplay the mutability of their condition, in order to present it as something that they are powerless to prevent.
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In the Year of Our Lord 2023, is that really the case? My sense from the doctors I know as friends is that they are absolutely loath to suggest, "Ya know, diet and exercise could help with..." because they know 1) Patients don't want to hear it, and 2) They aren't going to do it anyway.
I have other close friends who are obese and have proactively asked their doctor for help. Like pleading to have some direction, a support structure, a pathway to success. You know what the most phenomenal response I heard was? "Well, you're getting older... [next topic]."
In forums like this one, people constantly constantly lie about how weight loss/gain works. One bucket is CICO disbelievers generally (the true cranks). Others retreat to some form of, "Well, CICO may be true, but it's not helpful, so we really just need to point out that most people have absolutely no control over their weight." This is a complete lie that is far less helpful than explaining how things actually work and making suggestions for how to properly plan, build a support system, etc. It is not the people who are saying, "This is the way, walk you in it," who are doing the thing that doesn't work. It is the people who are perpetuating this lie, saying that the only choices are shame or doing nothing (or, I guess, like, chemicals or something that magically change CICO), who are doing the thing that doesn't work.
From my experience, that's completely not true. Every doctor suggests it as if it's a novel idea you've just never thought of. They don't have many suggestions beyond that, other than to tell you to go see a specialist, who also doesn't have any ideas to help.
The most frustrating thing I find is that doctors also don't want to tell you to just eat less, which is in my experience the only thing that'll cause you to lose weight. If you adopt a strategy of severely limiting calories or working with some strategy that works for you but is not officially approved (like being really strict but having cheat days), then they think you have an eating disorder, and they warn you about that. They tell you to just lose weight, but don't approve of options that actually work for you.
Perhaps we need some way of gathering data by sending a bunch of obese testers to doctors. Sort of in any event, either response is equally useless, though I can understand why doctors would opt for either path, given their experiences/incentives. What I think we can both probably agree on is that they are not likely to give real, actionable advice that can be directly pursued to success, and that is the real shame.
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I would say shame does work, but it needs to be more constant and even. You should feel shame evenly and not at distributed points.
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Yes. Shame should not be the only tool to assisting in reducing fatness.
We have a myriad of options other than shaming, let's use them all.
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I think there’s a bit of a difference between shaming and simply not going along with the problem. Watching your kids eat themselves into weighing well over 100 lbs before they hit double digits and not even saying anything is borderline abuse. Watching someone you care about eat themselves into morbid obesity and saying nothing isn’t being kind. And I think as far as the media goes, it shouldn’t promote unhealthy lifestyles. You could also consider taxing foods that cause obesity.
I'm not sure taxes are that effective here - it's analogous to the sin tax problem, addicts really want alcohol / cigarettes, and raising the price reduces their consumption, but doesn't stop them from eating them. And there's a lot of cheap awful food.
There aren't really any legal options here because any law that would 'work' would require a different legal system/culture that'd be willing to enforce it. Analogous to how even if all of the legislature and SCOTUS were possessed, they couldn't actually make infidelity illegal, nobody would follow or enforce that.
So imagining legal solutions is just larping, but anyway: Not allowing selling unhealthy food to fat people is an option, but they (probably?) care enough about eating massive amounts of food and you just get the war on drugs but worse because you can buy the drugs at walmart.
And that leaves banning unhealthy food - just not politically viable, nobody supports it. Most on the far-right who claim to support it on twitter would probably revolt when it banned the unhealthy stuff they liked.
One solution can be going through children:
We've had government guidance about eating for decades. The problem is that while the public have followed this guidance diligently (eat more carbs, replace animal fats with seed oils, eat less red meat) obesity trends ever upwards. People have obediently replaced butter with margarine and lard with canola oil based on the spurious idea that this would protect them from heart disease, and yet people have never been fatter.
The current childhood obesity rate in the US is at about 20%. Do you want to rip 20% of children from their parents because they happen to be victims of a global epidemic?
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Citation needed. I doubt most people are diligently following FDA guidelines. How many of them really do stick to the diet of 50 grams of protein, 78 grams of fat, 275 grams of carbs, top up with 180 more calories of your choosing (please choose protein)?
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Based on the quality of foster care and CPS... this seems like a major disaster for child welfare.
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You can't ban "unhealthy food" because in the case of obesity, the dose makes the poison.
This just seems flatly untrue. Surely any quantity of e.g. fizzy drinks is net-negative for nutritional content.
I don't think so? Certainly seltzers or non-nutritive sweetened sodas are basically neutral.
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I eat literal packets of gelatinized sugar while running long distances. I would be irritated if I wasn't allowed to do so because other people lack self-control.
Not that this solves the many problems of bans, but I (vague guess) don't think people would get fat off of sugar packets, for the same reason they don't just pour sugar into water and drink the sugar-water.
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Certainly not. It's not clear what "net-negative for nutritional content" would mean.
I mean that a fizzy drink is like tobacco or cocaine, in that there is no amount of it which is actually net-beneficial for the human body. It's not "the dose makes the poison": no quantity of it is good for you.
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I think you could cut and paste just about any movement in here. Whether you think the moderate defenders and allies are "sanewashing" the crazies depends entirely on whether you think the crazies are on the fringe, or just the ones standing out in the bailey saying the quiet part out loud.
I personally think "primarily a bunch of hate-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives" describes most modern social justice movements (particularly the woke ones we spend so much time criticizing here). Which doesn't mean they don't sometimes have legitimate grievances or weren't coming from a place of genuine injustice.
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The word "welfare" and the height of the fat person (roughly the average female height) clearly point to the "welfare mother" stereotype. White rednecks who rort SSDI for a living don't see themselves as on welfare as such, so they know the line isn't directed at them. The same logic is why PMC white male New Yorkers and Californians aren't bothered when their political allies say that "white men" are responsible for everyone bad in the world.
As a PMC white male who works in New York City, I can tell you this is entirely wrong. They are quite clear about saying that "white men" includes us, specifically.
Are they your political allies?
They are not my allies personally, but I'm similarly situated to white men who are. And like I said, they are very much into PMC white men (specifically white men in tech) being the problem. They know it's directed towards them and they accept that.
Sounds like they aren't bothered then.
They aren't bothered, but it isn't because they think it isn't directed at them. It's because they're OK with it being directed at them.
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Still is, but it used to be, too.
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