site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30141 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This excellent piece on age segregation has got me thinking about how serious and pervasive this problem is. As the author states:

Young adults are afraid to have children, because they can’t possibly imagine adding some to the life they currently have. New parents are isolated from most of their previous friends, as their paths suddenly never cross again unless they too have kids of their own. Children compete within their age group at schools, never having a chance to either mentor someone or have an older mentor themselves. Teenagers have no idea what to do with their lives, because they don’t know anyone who isn’t a teacher or their parent. And everyone is afraid of growing old because they think that the moment they stop going to the office they’ll simply disappear.

As discussed in @2rafa's post downthread, a major issue of the fertility crisis is a lack of time. Another issue it seems is a lack of even interacting with children unless you have some yourself, or have some in your family. I wonder if the lack of time among young adults in the West is causative of this age segregation?

Regardless, it likely has its roots in the K-12 education system. It's profoundly unnatural from a cultural standpoint to only be in the same peer group as people right around your age. I'm convinced it's unhealthy, and it predisposes us in a massive way to only socialize with people close to our age.

Do you think age segregation is an issue as well? If not, why not?

It takes a whole village to raise a child. The lack of fathers is often talked about but not the lack of grandparents, uncles aunts and cousins. Instead, we in the best case have two parents who work 40 hours + 10 hours of commuting and answering emails at home each totalling at 100 hours combined. Few people can afford good housing without ruining themselves. There are often no other relatives who can baby sit, cook, give second hand clothes and parenting advice.

We have replaced the village with paid services and fertility is low except for poor people with lacking impulse control and the rich who can afford to solve these issues. There is no uncle to take the kids fishing or fix their bike. Their is no aunt who can pick the kids up at school and babysit them. There are no grandparents who can serve as four extra parents. In much of the world grandparents do a lot of the cooking. In the west people eat expensive pre fab food instead.

I do believe the socialization factor that you bring up is a part of it. Children and childhood are so far removed from a 25 year old's life that it is easy to forget about. There can easily be a 35 year gap in a family during which there was no experience with children or childcare. New parents have to learn the skills from scratch, often without a single older adult around to teach them.

This is so underrated comment, it really is an unspoken bubble. The demographic change is huge, especially in Southeast Asia where people born in 50s or 60s are often from large families of 5 to 6 while their children have one child or are childless. I have a friend who is single child of single children on both parents side. He has a wife who is also single child although she herself has an aunt. But in general their combined family is incredibly small, if my friend's parents die he will have no living family in this world. This is the family of the future.

I have many uncles and aunts and number of cousins that I being me would probably mix some names. It is such a vast difference in social experience. My experience is just blip in history, it is a rare transition towards inevitable modernity.

I know a couple of only children of only children (one or even both parents). It makes me very sad, because in the latter case they really are all alone in the world after they die. No siblings, no cousins, deeply deeply tragic to think about.

Then again, my mom and dad both came from trad rural families with like 8-9 surviving children, so I have a ton of aunts, uncles and cousins, approximately none of which I see with any regularity outside of family events (since they don't live where I live).

True, it’s an option though. I’m grateful that if anything went badly wrong in my life (addiction, parents dying suddenly, some kind of deep depression etc) there are a lot of people who love me and who would take me in, at least for a time, and treat me as family. You never know how life will turn out, family is always the ultimate safety net.

The demographic change is huge, especially in Southeast Asia where people born in 50s or 60s are often from large families of 5 to 6 while their children

Or the United States, where people born in the 90s were often from large families of 5 or 6 while their children (if they lived in a city) have one or no children and (if they lived in the country) only had 2 or 3.

This is the family of the future.

Of course, by "90s" I mean "1890s". TFR by the early 1920s (when their children would be having children) was down to 2.3 in a country that was 50% rural- if we assume that people in rural areas are the ones bringing up the average (these old statistics never seem to differentiate by area) to a mere 3.0, that means the urban areas of the 1920s US had birth rates comparable to modern-day South Korea.

The fact that fertility rates only went down to 2.0 in the 1930s (the largest economic crisis in 100 years; the second largest would happen due to mass hysteria roughly 90 years later) is some evidence against this claim, though latex condoms and hormonal birth control weren't even invented yet. Urbanization inherently prices most people out of having kids (and sex in general) and most people don't really care all that much- both of things happen to be the the historical norm, too.

Come to think of it, it's interesting that the US entered WW2 sending a bunch of what would have been at that point only children and it's weird that nobody really talks about that (especially since the war on the border of the American Empire is being fought by groups with similarly bad TFRs and economic prospects that were assumed by some to be chilling effects).

Come to think of it, it's interesting that the US entered WW2 sending a bunch of what would have been at that point only children and it's weird that nobody really talks about that

Possibly because it is not, in fact, true.

it's interesting that the US entered WW2 sending a bunch of what would have been at that point only children

I'm pretty sure that's just not true. Unless by "a bunch" you mean "a small minority".

My experience is just blip in history

Mathematically his is too, right? Not every only-child is going to have kids, and in that extreme case, a TFR below 1 (hi, South Koreans! Remember that the last one there has to turn off the lights!) is as unstable as a TFR above 4.

it is a rare transition towards inevitable modernity.

I can barely imagine what a future stable modernity is going to look like. You could tell me anything from "After the AGIs cure aging low TFR is a good thing" to "After the environment/economy/whatever collapses and the low TFR subpopulations die out, Malthus has the last laugh for the next million years", and I wouldn't be sure you were wrong...

I think the thing that the ‘tradwife’ (almost always sitcom nuclear family tradwife, not how it actually was) memes don’t get is that many women don’t want to spend more than a decade without much adult company. Yeah, yeah, working for the man may be soulless or whatever, but you can make friends, you can gossip, you can go out for a drink after work or have lunch with your coworkers, you work together with other adults to achieve goals through the daytime hours.

I like children fine enough (and so did my mother) but to be the stereotypical suburban American SAHM you need to like children so much that you are fine only hanging out with them for a huge chunk of your life. Even on the weekend and in the evening mothers are primary parents. If you don’t have relatives nearby, then until the last kid goes to school, you’re mostly a 24/7/365 parent with the exception of times you pay for daycare (and while the kids are at school, at least for the first few years, much of your day is still going to be solo domestic chores or errands).

This means that, at least among smart or educated women who choose when or if they have kids, often only those most set on motherhood have children. People on the fence might like the idea of having children, might feel the biological imperative, but they override it because it seems like an impossible sacrifice.

Sometimes online SAHMs try to justify this lifestyle (I’m happy for those who enjoy it, by the way) by telling me how important it is to be around for every milestone, every development, to know everything about one’s children, to be deeply and thoroughly involved in every aspect of their education (maybe even homeschooling, which is especially popular on the right). But like, I don’t really care if I’m not around for a specific milestone. I’m sure I’ll love my children, but like my mother I doubt I’ll feel extreme pangs of jealousy if my kid sees their nanny as a maternal figure (as I did mine). And having accepted that most personality traits and intelligence are largely hereditary, pouring immense personal time into homeschooling seems redundant, as it’s unlikely to make a substantial difference to life outcomes (as Cochran etc have shown).

This idea of leaving one life and entering another (which again, if you like the company of other adults, is strictly worse in ways) is what scares many women about parenthood. Your social world goes from being huge to being yourself, your husband, some couples friends you see a few times a year and maybe another mother or two you see sometimes. Ideally the latter are pre-existing friends but often even this isn’t possible. The great majority of the time you’re alone with the kids (or just alone if they’re at school and you’re cleaning/cooking/shopping). You can see this even in the thread posted this week by someone asking where they could meet similar mothers, and where people were very excited by the idea some might live near each other. It’s clear this is a lonely business, and women are smart enough to realize it.

Many mothers don’t need to ‘work’ necessarily, but I think in many cases they need regular, consistent, significant time away from their children and/or in the company of other adults throughout their childhood. I think many women I know would be more willing to have children if they could be guaranteed this as an option. Currently it’s limited to the rich and to those people who still live in remaining tight-knit traditional communities.

Many mothers don’t need to ‘work’ necessarily, but I think in many cases they need regular, consistent, significant time away from their children and/or in the company of other adults throughout their childhood. I think many women I know would be more willing to have children if they could be guaranteed this as an option. Currently it’s limited to the rich and to those people who still live in remaining tight-knit traditional communities.

I think you're projecting an 80s PMC suburban lifestyle onto the 50s middle class. All the complaints you have (mother alone with two kids in a huge house, no adults) are only true for isolated people who moved repeatedly for their careers.

In the 1950s the TFR was 3+ and 80% of households were married with children. Kids were allowed to play unsupervised at 5 or 6. Nearly every house on your neighborhood was a family, and the streets were full of kids playing. Parents would visit with each other while the kids played. Most people lived in the city they grew up in, and thus near their extended family. Everyone went to church, even if they didn't believe.

In short, the ancient ties of kin, place, and faith were almost as strong in 1950 as they were in the deep past.

Everyone went to church, even if they didn't believe.

No, they didn’t. Everyone was a member of a church, but the actual attendance rate was mostly higher among Catholics. You are of course correct that fifties housewives visited with each other while their kids ran around like painted Indians, but the actual religiosity in practice of the fifties was a lot lower than you expect.

By the time I was 7, so in early 1990s at the height of the post-revolution crime waves, my parents were letting me roam the neighbourhood. I got up to some trouble, had to be slapped for stealing candy.

I didn't go very far at that age, maybe up to 1 km, but usually spent 2-3 hours outside playing. Pretty sure at 8 or 9 I sometimes roamed up to 2-3 km away and after 10 I frequently walked the 3.5 km home from school.

.. was something like this rare in the US cca 1990 ?

I legitimately don’t know, it was rare when I was growing up in the 2000’s(but not that rare) but I have no idea what 1990 was like.

.. was something like this rare in the US cca 1990 ?

Sounds like my childhood, so I'd say no.

many women don’t want to spend more than a decade without much adult company

This means that, at least among smart or educated women who choose when or if they have kids, often only those most set on motherhood have children. People on the fence might like the idea of having children, might feel the biological imperative, but they override it because it seems like an impossible sacrifice.

This idea of leaving one life and entering another (which again, if you like the company of other adults, is strictly worse in ways) is what scares many women about parenthood

You repeatedly call this a lack of adult company, but the problem you describe is not leaving the company of adults, but one of changing from socializing with non-parents to socializing with other parents. As a SAHM after the first year or so your free time is mostly during the workday, while non-SAHMs mostly have time to socialize after the work day ends (which for parents corresponds to mealtime and bedtime). To put it another way, motherhood comes with all the social detriments of a long-distance move. (But people still move all the time.)

Having experienced a modern society where SAHMs are normal, the first year of the first child is all about baby all the time, but the moms still socialize: they have support groups with other moms of their age group, call friends, use social media, and get a lot of emotional, logistical support, and time off via their parents and parents-in-law. Then once the kid socializes well with other kids they start meeting other moms almost daily, chatting while the kids play. The conversation is mostly centered on parenting, but that's mostly because, as you note, intellectuals aren't having kids.

As soon as the kids go to school (or usually preschool) then these SAHMs either gradually start working part-time or spend large portions of their days with their friends. I used to work in cafes a lot. There were many groups of SAHMs who would come into the cafe after lunch and spend roughly 1 PM to 5 PM hanging out. Book clubs, sports clubs, investment clubs. Of course, this society is almost invisible to non-SAHMs, because non-SAHMs are confined to the workplace during the day in places far away from where people live and where toddlers are raised. To the extent that non-mothers are ignorant of how much adult interaction SAHMs can get, I guess one might steelman your precise wording, but the true core of the issue here is that it's a change in social groups, not completely isolating. Unless you are in the top 5% of IQ, in which case you probably moved away from your parents and none of your friends who share your interests have had kids yet. Which I guess describes the average person in the Bay Area rational community as well as the average Mottizen.

The word "neighbour" is missing from your post. Stay at home mothers who live in houses next-door, could provide each other company. As I assume they did, when female workforce participation was lower.

This is one of those scenarios where it's easy to see a solution, but it lacks critical mass, much like walkable areas. You can't just decide to do it and hope the infastructure catches up.

If 60% of the houses in my neighborhood had stay-at-home moms in it with kids, and maybe a walkable park / swimclub within it, then you've lowered the barrier tremendously. Most women can find at least a few other people among dozens who they can get along with and their kids can play together. When 5-10% of the houses have this it's the same as not existing unless you win a lottery. Most importantly in the 60%+, you ahve the added diversity of the fact that the neighborhood with a lot of different priorities and levels of commitment to find your nitch amongst but likely all within a similar socio-economic class

On the other hand, intentional communities can only half-way bridge this. You will end up with a very particular selection effect that will almost necessarily require a much bigger dedication to the community and much deeper in-crowd vibes with a particular temperment and expectation. It's the difference between playing pick-up games with your neighbors and joining a club team.

In the absence of organic, SAHM friendly societies and neighborhoods, going at it alone and joining a Benedict Option style commune are two distantly inferior options. The families of GenX defected at too high a rate and broke the option.

You trust your neighbours enough to interact with them? hahahahahahahahaha

  • -17

I bake my neighbors cookies and so far one of my neighbors has even returned the plate (along with a bottle of wine.)

Two doors down there is a single dad with two kids around the same age as mine. Across the street is a couple with three kids, slightly older. Next door on one side is a retiree who lost her cat when she moved in. On the other side is another family with small kids.

I have a play structure in my backyard which makes my house a good place to invite kids over. Excuses are easy to find if I'm willing to put in the effort.

Suburbia can be a soulless hell. I need to cross a highway to get to any commercial space - restaurant, grocery store, other kind of shop. But I know right off the bat that most of my neighbors are homeowners, have jobs that can pay for houses and cars, have kids and the responsibilities that go with that, can follow the most basic rules of the HOA (I don't like there is an HOA, but recognize it as a filter.) As a baseline they are more trustworthy than anyone I pass on the street. I am putting in the work to cultivate those relationships but I believe it is worthwhile.

I remember growing up in suburbia, I rode my bike in the neighborhood with the other kids. I would go to other kids' homes and knock on their front door and ask, "Is Heather home?" I would kick the ball in my backyard over the fence and have to go to the street one over and knock on a stranger's door and ask if I could retrieve my ball. My parent's mostly watched me through the kitchen window - I had a great deal of independence even by the time I was five years old.

My mom met with friends almost every day, either at a McDonalds with a play place, a park, or someone's home.

The change, as far as I perceive it, happened around 9/11. Same neighborhood, same kids, same families, but people stopped visiting as much. I wasn't allowed to go out by myself as much. A layer of optimism was stripped away.

I guess that's why I think it is mostly an attitude thing, not anything inherent to the suburbs. And why I stubbornly believe I can create a community if I keep pressing my neighbors to interact with me.

I just want to say thank you for doing this. Efforts like yours are the sort of thing that creates meaningful, appreciable change in the world that talking about problems on a forum does not.

The only time I've ever had community was when I did something similar, and it seems that most people are just waiting for someone to reach out. They aren't antisocial, just non-agentic. To everyone reading this who wants community: try and do the same. Report back on how it goes!

Low effort and contentless, and you seem to only be here for comments like this.

I'm escalating this ban to a week on the grounds of you being purely obnoxious. Just go away if this is all you're here for.

I agree, the idea that missing a "milestone" matter is insanity. I doubt I will remember 5 years later, and I know they won't. Why does it matter if you are not around 24/7 for your kids as long as they are ok?

People have an extreme investment in their children now, partially because they have fewer children but also because society strongly pushes parents into being helicopter parents.

I thought of putting this in, but one of the issues is that you can't even let your kid be a 'latchkey kid' in a regular city anymore because the only other parents who let their kids have that freedom at a young age are dysfunctional/divorced/broken homes/neglectful, so your kid will end up around the wrong crowd by default. Any 'respectable' PMC parent is helicoptering, so you have to too, you can't defect by yourself.

Good point. I think it's another example how different aspects of social atrophy form a vicious cycle. It's probably also safe to assume that if you're likely to invite social disapproval and censure as a young PMC mother if you make too many obvious attempts to get away from your own children throughout the day one way or another.

I thought of putting this in, but one of the issues is that you can't even let your kid be a 'latchkey kid' in a regular city anymore because the only other parents who let their kids have that freedom at a young age are dysfunctional/divorced/broken homes/neglectful, so your kid will end up around the wrong crowd by default. Any 'respectable' PMC parent is helicoptering, so you have to too, you can't defect by yourself.

The problem here isn't the city, it's the American PMC. Those people are neurotic.

You can give your ten year old a key and a bus pass in Singapore with no problems whatsoever. I had a key, a bike, and the run of the city at ten. Where I live right now, it looks like twelve is the age where kids roam free.

Of course, I'm neither PMC nor underclass.

I mean, in my standard average working class neighborhood I can look out the front window and watch the neighborhood kids playing either unsupervised or indifferently ‘supervised’ by teenagers that are actually shooting hoops or gossiping about boys. These are owned single family homes where the kids are full time residents, too. This might be an exception, but I think it much more likely that the PMC is just neurotic and creates their own problems by being neurotic.

Seems to me to your post is the marshmallow test. Being a parent is hard for the first 5 or so years (but is also full of joy). The older the kids get the easier it is and you get the rich life of being a parent and hopefully a grandparent.

Maybe you can view modern parenting as a gauntlet that you have to suffer through to get the joy of a family in old age (and I'm sure some do). But that doesn't mean it has to be that way. Of course having kids is always going to be work, but in previous generations much more of the burden was shared between extended families and communities in ways that meant that individual mothers weren't carrying as much individual responsibility on their backs.

I’m not arguing that atomization is good. Just that there are still plenty of reasons to have kiddos.

Being a parent is hard for the first 5 or so years

And then it becomes even harder when puberty hits.

Different kind.

Suburbia is souless and atomizing conpared to traditional towns and cities. There aren't people on the streets, there are cars. There are no natural places to meet people, distances are vast and people are isolated in their fenced in homes. suburbia encourages loneliness. It is quite absurd that people are so isolated that they prefer being in a cubical just to have people around them.

What's funny about this is that my experience is largely the opposite: I recently visited some friends in the north Dallas metroplex, which is about as close to the platonic ideal of detached-house suburbia as you can get sprawling in all directions, and they know their neighbors on all sides by name (and which tools and skills they regularly trade), and live within a few hundred meters of an HOA-managed playscape where they regularly encounter the same few dozen children and parents. As far as I can tell, the folks I know in the NYC area have much more trouble meeting their neighbors behind closed apartment doors, with front yards replaced with dark interior hallways, and porches replaced with coffee shops and bars.

I'd buy that the experience varies a lot by personality, though: if you are looking for a particular niche interest friend group, the city is probably a better choice, and suburbia can be pretty underwhelming. But I do think suburbs are often undersold generally.

Indeed, when I lived in an apartment, I have not known a single person living in the same building. I asked my friends about, and this has been everyone else’s experience as well. Now, I know all the people on my SFH suburban street, and regularly hang out with some of them.

When people say things like suburbia being atomizing, I’m really dumbfounded — compared to what? Just because there are a lot of people walking down the street doesn’t mean that it’s easier to socialize, in fact it is the opposite. Humans enter different behavioral modes in different settings. When there are a lot of people around, we naturally tend to detach ourselves mentally, and treat everyone as an irrelevant blob. If, on the other hand, we get bunched together with only a couple of people at a time, it feels more natural to strike the conversation (in fact, sometimes it’s awkward not to). Go to a mass rock concert, and try to make new friends, and then go to a jam session in a hole-in-the-wall bar and try the same. Which is easier?

As far as I can tell, the folks I know in the NYC area have much more trouble meeting their neighbors behind closed apartment doors, with front yards replaced with dark interior hallways, and porches replaced with coffee shops and bars.

As I've mentioned before, I think place hardly matters.

Take a sociable Puerto Rican from NYC and drop him in a Miami suburb, and he'll build up a social network quickly - or the other way around. Strong communities are found everywhere from Svalbard to the Amazon, and yes, in the Dallas suburbs.

The lonely PMC people in NYC were lonely in the suburbs they grew up in (and are rebelling against).

So much of the angst about suburbs specifically and place in general are driven by loveless and unlovable people moving from place to place because they don't realize that their problem isn't what's outside the, but what's inside them.

So much of the angst about suburbs specifically and place in general are driven by loveless and unlovable people moving from place to place because they don't realize that their problem isn't what's outside the, but what's inside them.

In previous generations these people mostly did completely fine. Denying that environment and culture has any impact on community is ridiculous. Sure, the NYC Puerto Rican will be fine in a Miami suburb, but will his kids raised there still have a social network as dense and as local as he had?

You really can force people to make friends by putting them in the same spaces frequently (and making them collaborate), and it's a good thing. The military does this, boarding schools do this, many traditional social institutions did and do this. Things start awkwardly, and then people get comfortable, and they become in many cases firm friends even if they are very different (and especially if they're similar).

Nobody's denying that a conscientious, outgoing, charming and confident individual with lots of time can build a big social circle anywhere, but most people aren't this. Most people need a little help. They're not broken, they want friends, it's just harder. If you go to "traditional" societies almost nobody has friends they deliberately made like an autistic tinder user. They have friends from childhood, friends who are their parents' friends children, or their grandparents' friends' grandchildren, or their cousins or cousins' childhood friends.

That what this actually means. In a traditional society your entire circle can be an organic web of friends and family that stay with you your entire life.

In previous generations these people mostly did completely fine. Denying that environment and culture has any impact on community is ridiculous. Sure, the NYC Puerto Rican will be fine in a Miami suburb, but will his kids raised there still have a social network as dense and as local as he had?

If they stay in Miami for as many generations as they did in New York, of course they would. There are plenty of older East Coast suburbs where families go back for generations. Any permanent settlement where people stay for generations is going to form communities.

I think it depends where in NYC you live, but it's also about social circles, for sure. Manhattan is so dense, though, that your kids are very likely going to have classmates who live less than ten minutes from you by foot, if not much closer. I had friends growing up who had other kids their age in their co-op / apartment building who went to the same school that we did, so they could play and go in together.

People who raise parents in Manhattan and who don't tend to move out to the burbs also tend to be (regardless of their wealth, which is also a requirement for the most part) lifelong New Yorkers, often born and raised, and so often have much more extensive networks of friends and family in the city. Or they're expats, who have their own social circles.

Manhattan is so dense, though, that your kids are very likely going to have classmates who live less than ten minutes from you by foot, if not much closer.

Every detached single family home suburb I've lived in had classmates a lot closer than a 10 minute walk. There were always classmates on the same street even. And that's in various towns.

I recently visited some friends in the north Dallas metroplex, which is about as close to the platonic ideal of detached-house suburbia as you can get sprawling in all directions, and they know their neighbors on all sides by name (and which tools and skills they regularly trade), and live within a few hundred meters of an HOA-managed playscape where they regularly encounter the same few dozen children and parents.

Maybe I'm too dense, but at the end of the day, does this metroplex actually offer what sociologists call third places?

You mean the playground he just referenced?

And I mean ‘talks to other moms while both their littles climb on the playground equipment’ basically is my mental image of what UMC stay at home moms do when they aren’t busy with housework/childcare/whatever. It’s not as if a park as a third space is difficult to imagine.

I don't find that suburbia has a shortage of parks (or churches). The example of the HOA playscape (small park) isn't gated, but is probably only used by local residents. I'd also count the grade-separated mixed use paths through the area.

It does, but they are outdoors.

I grew up in the suburbs. I played football in the street, and full court basketball across the street. I knocked on my friends doors to see if they could play, and then we rode our bikes to the supermarket to buy candy and soda.

Now I live in the suburbs. Back when the kids needed watching I'd sit on a folding chair in someone's driveway with the other dads, watching kids play in the street.

Just because you're a Billy no-mates doesn't mean the rest of us are.

"Suburbia" is extremely diverse, there are suburbs with widely spaced out McMansions with driveways leading off a an artery road that has no sidewalks such that it would be genuinely dangerous to send your kid over to a neighbor a couple of street away, and there are suburbs (particular older ones with smaller houses, or streetcar suburbs in older cities) that are denser, have sidewalks, very low speed limits on roads, and which are more conducive to community.

GDP is higher if free time of people is spent staring into magic soul stealing mirrors.

Maybe. Anyway, not that our society is able to regulate predatory business practices.

Am writing this squatting in the downstairs bathroom in the family dacha. It's 0130. I should have already showered. Got an urge to check Twitter.

A bad habit, costs me 10 hours a week, at least. Payoff ..well, I can usually tell you tomorrow's headlines. Useless, really.

Another ten minutes of my life gone.

I really think a big part of the next 50 years is going to be a screens equivalent to puritan prohibition movements.

The way we use the black rectangles with absolutely no restraint is literally killing us and turning us insane, and the natural reaction to new pressures like that has always been the apparition of new religious norms.

Maybe those creepy AI videos of Master Chief and Batman telling you not to watch porn are onto something.

Zero Theorem is proving more prophetic every day.

The trouble is that simple prohibition doesn't work for screens. I could go cold-turkey on using screens for movies, video games, social media, chats, and silly Motte arguments, and maybe my life would be better on net or maybe it would be worse, but it'd still be a reasonable life. But if I went cold-turkey on using screens for paperwork (paying bills, hiring contractors, making purchases) or personal research (figuring out what's worth getting a bill for, what contractors to hire, what products to buy) it would be a massive inconvenience, and if I went cold-turkey on using screens for work-work I'd be fired. "Never drink alcohol" is a reasonable Schelling point that makes prohibitionism a conceivable ideology there. "Never use screens" isn't.

Maybe there's some equally clear Schelling point I'm missing, a bright-line rule under which e.g. having some stupid argument about climate change on Facebook would obviously be avoided but hitting up the IPCC reports page or having a kind chat with old friends on Facebook wouldn't? I'd love to know what the rule is. And by that I don't mean "I'm rhetorically challenging the possibility of it existing", I mean "if it's good I'd like to try it out for a week or two".

I do fear that I should be rhetorically challenging the possibility of a clear and unambiguous rule existing, though. Perhaps in 50 years the problem will have been solved, not when we come up with a simple rule, but when we just have a population of people who avoid draining all their time and sanity into screens because of cultural or genetic selection bias. Young people at that point will be the ones for whom two or three generations of their parents had constant access to pocket screens and were resistant enough to the downsides to form stable families anyway.

Porn would be a problem even if greenscreen command linw and bitrates of 10 kilobit were the pinnacle of interface. People out there have fucked up their brain wiring through erotica alone. True, it's a rare person who reads.

I agree that more age mixing would be a healthier norm, but my revealed preferences (child in pre-K, working at a large public school, moved away from parents and in-laws...) suggest that I don't really care all that much. This very mild preference does not seem to affect any of my actual decisions.

Upon finding out I was pregnant I thought something like "I've never known a baby, but chances are I'll love my baby. All my ancestors succeeded at this, I probably will too." That turned out to be correct thus far. This attitude may be more true for women than men, though.

I do think age segregation is a problem for all the reasons you observe. One room schoolhouses were once the norm, with older kids helping younger. Larger families and tribes were once the norm, with older children contributing to raising younger children. Children working alongside parents was once the norm; they learned labor at their parents' side, by doing (badly at first, then better as they grew).

But segregation is, or is at least believed to be, efficient. Adults can get more work done if they aren't simultaneously tending to children. Children can be educated en masse if they are sorted by approximate ability. Age is an efficient approximator of ability--far from precise, but adequate for factory-style education.

I assume that we could probably have the civilization we do without the age segregation, but maybe I'm wrong about that. I bet there is a charter school or private school out there somewhere experimenting with mixed-age classrooms; it would be interesting to see how those operate in modernity.

I believe a lot of the Montessori schools do this.

That's a definition of Montessori teaching. There are a few multi-year age groups. If a school segregates year-by-year then they aren't Montessori.

My elementary school gifted program combined 1st-5th grade into one classroom with two teachers. The child had to have a IQ score of 130+ to be assigned into the classroom. I can't really say if the age mixing was very beneficial. There's the obvious cofounder of everyone having a high IQ. It wasn't disastrous, at least. I think I had trouble learning spelling compared to my peers in normal classes, but I was ahead in reading and logic.

Montessori age groups are 3 years each starting age 3 and up. But under 3s are separate into 2 groups, little babies and toddlers.

So yeah, plenty of Montessori private schools don't segregate year-by-year.

The reality of age segregation becomes blatant if you spend any time in a nursing home and see the residents living in an eternal present punctuated by episodes of The Price is Right, feuds with other residents, and rounds of meds. Those residents with families who visited them regularly had something to look forward to and experiences with people who weren't just acquaintances who lived on the same floor. I volunteered in one for a while in my 30s and the residents would often go out of their way to get my attention, chatting and having the attention of someone younger made them happier. The perspectives that the young and the old can give each other are invigorating to both cohorts. Keeping the old away from the young makes aging an unknown to the young, and thence something to be feared.

I will note that I truly felt sad for those in the home without any family to visit them. Volunteers would be assigned to specific patients, but many people had no one and it just looked to be a lonely existence.

A recent interaction I had with an 80-something woman had me thinking about this very thing. I've been trying to come up with some sort of non-profit model that could work toward solving this problem.

In France there are intergenerational homesharing agencies which offer young people cheap rent in return for living with an elderly person.

I was a hospice volunteer and they tend to do a good job at connecting volunteers with people who have no kin or are estranged from their kin. The problem is, those people need to be on hospice to receive the benefit of the volunteers, and there could certainly be benefits for those not just on death's door.

Reminds me of the research on Swedish (or some other Nordic country) families, and how number of younger siblings or siblings in general causes next generation to have more kids. It seemed like oldest sibling will always have more kids than younger sibs (though I assume oldest kids with siblings have more kids than only child kids).

My immediate thought was that it means people that grew up with younger kids and inevitably helping take care of their younger siblings have the exposure to raising kids. Changing diapers and feeding kids and all this stuff isn’t something they have to imagine, cuz they’ve done it! But the youngest sibling wouldn’t have that experience so would tend to have fewer kids cuz lack of experience etc. I would assume this means only children that have a lot of kid experience/exposure would also have more kids (from younger cousins / babysittinf / etc).

So fertility is self enforcing: the more kids you have, the more kids, on average, they would have.

Or the oldest are generally more fit since definitional the mother was younger when pregnant

Also the interesting fact that younger brothers are much more likely to be gay than older brothers.

According to several studies, each older brother increases a male child's naturally occurring odds of having a homosexual orientation by 28–48%. However, the numbers of older sisters, younger brothers, and younger sisters have no effect on those odds.

Even beyond the clear separation of kids from adults, and all of us from the genuinely elderly, something I've noticed in non-western countries is that kids themeslves aren't as strictly separated into age brackets. It can be pretty normal in some places for a few teenagers to also have some 7 or 8 year olds around when they're hanging out and no one seems to think it's embarassing or boring.

I think age segregation is a problem, but I’m not sure there’s a good solution to it, either. Ideally robust extended families would function to break it, but we don’t have those and we’re not going to.

There's a solution, but you wouldn't like it.

Create a movement that wishes to see the world dangerous again.

Create a doctrine that attracts people and abhors the managerial regime. Patiently disrupt services through least legally risky forms of sabotage.

Once things come tumbling down, actual serious hardship is real, there's anarchy, people will form communities. Or die, bit the survival drive of most people is strong.

There's no reason for community if what the omnipresent state can't give you isn't something the market can either sell you directly or provide you with an inferior substitute of.

Seems space exploration and colonization could be a good outlet for the dangerous world desires.

I agree. I think without a frontier to explore, people tend to get neurotic and society mutates in ways that aren’t ultimately healthy. Plus, we don’t have to destroy things or depopulate earth. Just send them to mars.

For there to be exploration you need something interesting to find, otherwise why send people to Mars? For them to fuck around and waste expensive to ship supplies?

The purpose of a frontier is settlement. The goal would be to create "self-sustaining" settlements on the Moon or Mars. ("Self-sustaining" here meaning economically, primarily, not literally able to exist forever with zero imports)

The incentive mechanism is straightforward: so long as settlers require economic subsidy, they are citizens of the colonizing nation, like regular astronauts, bound by its laws and duties. Once they are economically self-sufficient and can pay for their inputs on the open market, they gain political independence, ownership of the settlement passes to the settlement collectively, and they may choose to establish whatever form of government seems best to them.

Why would any government subsidize the creation of a colony with no expectation of ultimately realising the profits?

Well, there are minerals in space. More land and this more space for people. We sent people to the New World on leaky boats on the promise of land for the taking and possibly minerals.

I've never quite believed this kind of pat 'if you don't cuddle your baby hard enough they will definitely become a traumatized psychopath' explanation. Children these days receive a vast amount of stimulation and social engagement, far more than in premodern society, but we still have rapists and murderers among us. Not do I see how this is an increasing problem. Parents spend more time with their children than ever. And of course, the 'blame the nuclear family' trick, the latest fashion. We've been loving in nuclear families for oh, only about four hundred years now. How is this a new problem?

We've known about attachment theory for a long time and have demonstrated some of its features in animal models like monkeys. Granted true deficiency is a bit more serious than the above examples. It also may be helpful to think of the murdering/rapist case as a multi-hit model. Someone has the genetics or personality structure that renders them vulnerable to doing the fucked up shit AND then they are also raised in this way. It's more of a "most psychopaths had shitty parenting" then "most people raised with shitty parenting become psychopaths."

Note that shitty parenting likely correlates with heritable psychopathic tendencies. It's like ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). There's a ton of research showing that ACEs are correlated with had life outcomes, with the researchers and media glibly asserting causality, but if you actually look at the canonical list of ACEs, it's markers of bad parenting like "abused by parents" and "parent went to prison," not random bad luck like "raped by a stranger on the way home from school" or "injured in a serious car accident."

So there's an obvious genetic explanation that's being almost totally ignored by the people who are supposed to be the experts.

New parents are isolated from most of their previous friends, as their paths suddenly never cross again unless they too have kids of their own.

I don't think that's a case of age segregation.

Excavation after 14 anomalies detected at former residential school site found no evidence of graves: Manitoba chief

Although these excavations were at a different residential school than Kamloops, the technology and methodology used to identify the "potential" mass graves, GPR analysis, were the same that motivated the Manitoba excavations. Similar to Kamloops, the GPR results were combined with rumors and witness testimonies of atrocities to formulate a belief in the existence of mass graves on the Manitoba site which did lead to a 4 week excavation...

By using radar technology, 14 “anomalies” were previously detected at the site. This led to frenzied speculation by the media that mass graves existed, consisting of Indigenous children who were forced to attend the residential school...

... to this day, no human remains have been found at any former residential school in Canada.

Media in Canada first reported on mass graves at residential schools in May 2021. Archeologists detected what they believed to be 200 unmarked graves at an old school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

To this date, no excavations of that site has occurred, with local elders citing intergenerational trauma as the reason for leaving potential proof of a genocide buried.

The 200 “unmarked graves” in Kamloops were identified by the same technology that identified the 14 in Manitoba, which we now know turned out to be nothing more than a pile of rocks underground.

Even to this day, the CBC has been hellbent on perpetuating a ‘mass graves’ interpretation of said anomalies that have been detected at various former residential school sites.

The media’s absolute worst interpretation of the anomalies inspired protests and terrorist arson across the country.

Since the mass graves announcement, at least 83 churches have been burned to the ground or vandalized.

From the beginning I strongly suspected we were never going to see excavations at Kamloops, because this would be the result. This is a familiar M.O when waging culture war. Hysterically allege an atrocity that didn't happen, base those sensational claims on very thin evidence combined with rumor and witness testimony, and then claim some religious or spiritual dispensation for minimum-standard scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves. Lastly, make sure to denounce everyone who demands excavations as a genocide denier:

Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?

But. Where. Are. The. Bodies?

They are where they were buried — in those secret or official graves. At this point, nobody is going to be digging up those children to satisfy a bunch of white settlers’ points of view as to what we should be doing with our tragically deceased little ones.

Currently, we don’t have protocols in place yet (that I’m aware of) on how to sensitively deal with the graves. However, we are taking our cultural beliefs into consideration, which go against unsettling rest spaces. This call for bodies is nothing more than a racist rant bordering on genocide denial.

How far will a denier go? When no longer able to refute the absurdly massive physical evidence, Holocaust deniers started to appeal to more “scientific” data. For example, they claimed that the chemical analysis of hydrogen cyanide compounds showed the amounts were not sufficient enough to kill people in gas chambers. Posing as tourists, these “scientists” would gouge chunks of plaster from the walls of gas chambers to send them for analysis.

What happened in residential schools is not about the evidence. This kind of trolling is part of genocide, as are the actual crimes. Gregory H. Stanton, an expert on crimes against humanity, described 10 stages of genocide; extermination is not the final step. Rather, its final stage is denial that it happened — such as high-profile commentators’ demands to see bodies.

I suspect we will continue to see smaller-scale excavations elsewhere, because finding any remains at all anywhere would at least be able to provide some fuel to the Kamloops narrative. But the alleged site of the Kamloops mass grave will simply become a memorial where the alleged victims can wage racial-grievance politics for financial and political gain, and it will be sacrilege to be so hateful as to demand excavations to actually investigate the claims which have been made.

This has all happened before. When the skepticism gets too great they dig where a known cemetery is and trumpet the finding of bodies.

(and no, this does not mean the holocaust didn't happen)

I am feeling a little stupid here. But what’s the big deal with graves? Your telling me people born before the 19th century died?

Mass graves have a different connotation of a “bad” group killed a bunch of a now viewed “good” group and hence buried them all at the same time. The only accusations I’m seeing on mass deaths would be from western diseases killing a lot at once. Which isn’t exactly the Churches fault.

Surely they don’t mean Catholics machine gunned a bunch of 7 year olds resulting in mass graves.

I feel like the promoters of this want “mass graves” = holocaust, Russia executing Polish military officers etc. But I am not seeing that argument and at best accusations of schools being overcrowded.

But what’s the big deal with graves?

Going by the furore here in Ireland over similar claims about mother and baby homes (places where women could go to have their illegitimate child), the train of thought runs something like this:

The graves, if any, are unmarked. This shows a lack of care and regard for the dead babies and the parents of those dead babies (now, there was a whole thing about burying unbaptised children whou would not get a funeral service or be buried in consecrated ground, but that's a different matter). The evil and wicked Church stigmatised women who were sexually active outside of marriage and who got pregnant outside of marriage. The illegitimate children who may have been orphans or snatched from their families and put into institutions like this were abused both passively, by neglect, and actively by the wicked and evil nuns.

That means not feeding them properly, not calling in doctors when they were sick, and not spending money on medicine or medical treatment for them. Because of this neglect, the death rates were higher than they should have been, and then to add insult to injury the bodies were dumped into mass graves with no markers or religious ceremonies or records or even notifying any family of the death. This was all done to stigmatise and punish the children for being bastards and the mothers for being unwed. Meanwhile, the religious orders took the money which should have gone to caring for the children and kept it to enrich themselves.

Because today we are much more sensitive around bereavement and death, this is completely unacceptable and the people responsible must be held accountable.

I imagine the Kamloops situation adds in racism, forced taking of children, and lack of burial by their tribal traditions and culture on top of all that.

Surely they don’t mean Catholics machine gunned a bunch of 7 year olds resulting in mass graves.

Not machine gunned, but yeah - the general idea is that the wicked and evil nuns/brothers/priests/Church treated these children as inferior and sub-human, hated them, and didn't care about them so pretty much wanted them dead. That means neglecting, starving, beating, not giving them heat when needed, not treating illnesses, and not caring if they all died off, then dumping the bodies like rubbish.

The unmarked bit is something that is difficult, because I see old graveyards round here with unmarked graves, or only a stone to mark where a burial happened. The original wooden markers all rotted away over the years, or people couldn't afford to put up a gravestone, so over the years locations of 'who is buried where' have been lost. I could see that happening too with residential schools; temporary markers put up which were lost over the years.

I've posted this before here, and it bears reposting here, with some edits meant as improvement:

This whole thing reminds me of the news stories about the children's mass grave in Tuam, Ireland, and of supposed mass graves in Tulsa, Oklahoma where racist mass-murdering demons buried the victims of the 1921 "race massacre", or so we're told.

When I try looking at these affairs without bias and prejudice, I try putting myself in the shoes of the average Western middle-class suburban white normie NPC, and frankly I realize that, unless some heretic specifically makes an effort to educate me on this, I'll probably have zero understanding of the following hard facts about the bygone days of the West:

1/ It was normal to bury people in unmarked individual paupers' graves, or even in unmarked mass paupers' graves (in the case of, say, an epidemic or some similar catastrophe) if nobody claimed the corpse, or if the relatives were too poor to, or unwilling to, afford a proper burial. This, in fact, was not rare.

2/ Back when national economies were yet too undeveloped to produce a surplus to be spent on, frankly, luxuries, there was exactly zero public support for spending tax money* to improve the material conditions of single mothers so that they have the same prospects in life as married wives**.

*Keep in mind, please, that, unlike today, milking the impregnators for child support under the threat of imprisonment wasn't an option either in most cases, because they were either dead, or already in prison/workhouse, or too poor to be milked for money.

**Again, let's be clear about this: back in the days of benighted Papist Ireland, or in any similar patriarchal society, I can assure you there were probably zero housewives willing to tolerate the spectre of the government basically confiscating a given % of her husband's income and giving it to unwed mothers in the form of state handouts. The extent to which Christian societies in such economic conditions were willing to go to look after the downtrodden was basically to shove them onto the Church and leave them to hold the bag. In the same way, the Church was basically expected to sweep up a portion of single men and women that were unmarriageable for whatever reason and train them to be monks, priests and nuns, so that they were no longer a problematic pain in the butt to their own families.

3/ Also, a society that poor is also unable to pay for lavishly equipped, professional, extensive police forces. This means extrajudicial punishment, communal vigilantism and mob justice was seen as normal and necessary by most people, at least to a certain extent.

4/ Stray dogs were normally slaughtered and their cadavers/bones were used for producing animal glue and other similar products, because you could be sure absolutely nobody was going to contribute material resources to founding and running comfy dog shelters. (I know this has nothing to do with these manufactured scandals, but I included it because we know that white liberals just love dogs.)

This is one of the things that I find utterly weird about our moment in history. We just have no concept of how much of what we have is a product of simply having abundance. We can afford to put people in jail being completely unproductive for years and even decades and still feed them for all that. We can afford to pay people who cannot (and often will not) do anything productive. We can afford to tolerate a great deal of deviant behavior and ideologies. And I’ve always strongly suspected that most of not all of our “enlightened ways” come down to us being wealthy enough to be enlightened.

And I think when the surplus goes away (either because of space colonization or collapse) we’ll have to go back to the unenlightened ways of our ancestors. When you not doing productive work means a lack of food, or your deviant behavior puts others at risk or consumes too many resources, other people aren’t going to put up with that for long. If your “transition” in whatever form it takes, costs too many medical resources and you live in a place where medical care isn’t easy to come by, that by itself harms people. The blood used for your top surgery means a shortage of blood for people having accidents or something, or maybe a shortage of antibiotics as well, people aren’t going along with that because they understand that it means they might not get medical care.

Indeed. Just to provide one example off the top of my head, pencil lengtheners were routinely used in public education, especially primary schools, pretty much everywhere in the world until, say, the middle of the 20th century. Just think about it. Even though pencils were mass-produced as the cheapest writing instruments in existence, just buying the necessary number of pencils, even the cheapest ones, was considered by the average family an expense large enough that there was widespread demand for a dirt-cheap instrument that had no purpose other than lengthening the service life of a pencil. I's unfathomable when we look back to that.

I feel like I’m pounding this point because when I see the headlines of mass graves at Catholic Schools I’m thinking something akin to Katyn Massacre. Which this is clearly not. I have no idea if they treated them fairly but that’s not discussed. The headlines sound like the nuns were literally Hitler.

They don't match up with the existing documentation.

At the Kamloops school that started everything, there were 215 GPR hits but only 51 recognized deaths (I don't know if there are known graves for a total of 51+215 = 266 suspected total deaths, or if it was 215 - 51 = 164 suspected undocumented deaths.)

If there truly was a 70-80% under-reporting rate, it would indicate severe problems with the Truth and Reconciliation processes.

This has all happened before. When the skepticism gets too great they dig where a known cemetery is and trumpet the finding of bodies.

You mean they will rely on GPR results at the site of the alleged mass grave to stoke the narrative, and then go and dig elsewhere at a known cemetery to trumpet human remains? You are right, this has all happened before.

Sorry for the lateness of this reply, but you're banned for a week: egregiously obnoxious and single-issue posting (Jews).

Posting about the "mass graves" brouhaha (dare I say "hoax?") in Canada was fine; if someone else had posted about it and then you'd come in with this comment I would have hit you immediately for attempting to derail the conversation. My only hesitation, and why I discussed it with the other mods first, was that it's a bit weird to accuse you of derailing your own thread, I think? But it has this weird bait-and-switch feel to it; you were, refreshingly, not pounding your one-note piano for a change... just kidding, it was a post about Jews all along!

Don't do this.

This kind of trolling is part of genocide, as are the actual crimes.

Really? Can people say this with a straight face? I kind of get the appeal of creating a gigantic circular, question-begging argument as a naked flex of power, yet it's still so repulsive.

Consider other approaches of dealing with grievance politics. The Turkish interpretation of the Armenian Genocide is that the Armenians were traitors and bad elements trying to undermine the state and kill Muslims - effectively that they deserved what they got in the 'Armenian Matter'. That's what's taught in Turkish schools:

The question children are asked to debate is, "What should be done to promote our country's justification against Armenian claims?" Stating that "we have duties in relation to the internal and external threats against our country," students are invited to "be conscious of these threats."

And Turkey is still working to wreck Armenia today, in combination with Azerbaijan. There's no law of nature that says there's any need to feel guilty about wrecking other nations in the distant past. You don't see the Algerians and Tunisians apologizing for enslaving Europeans en masse. Genghis Khan is valorised in Mongolia and gets great statues erected to him.

There is besides the circular argument base stealing. Holocaust has denials. We have denials here. Therefore we are just like the Holocaust.

Are the Catholic churches they are burning typically those frequented by natives, or are they those with largely European congregations?

From what I remember from summer 2021 mostly the former. They were typically churches on or near rural reserves, and in general indigenous Canadians are more church-going than your average Canadian of European descent. One of the amusing results of this was that indigenous elders tended to be much more outspoken against the church burnings (some links: 1, 2, 3), while you practically had to drag condemnations out of Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh (leaders of the major center and center-left parties, respectively).

There were a few exceptions, like an Egyptian Coptic church that was targeted, or a Vietnamese church..

By the way, does anyone know what the current status is of the sensationalized "investigations" into the "mass graves" of the victims of the Tulsa "race massacre"?

Can anyone who is not Holocaust denier, with SS-man as nickname, can confirm is this summary above is true and accurate?

  • -30

This is actually the second excavation to turn up no actual corpses. I don't think there's any basis for doubt that a lot of children died at the residential schools, partly due to the fact that children dying was a common occurrence back then, and partly due to the fact that they were kept in crowded housing that promoted the spread of infectious disease. Poor nutrition and extra susceptibility to European diseases may or may not have been factors.

However, it's clear now that the false positive rate of these GPR investigations is very high (0 for 48, by my count), and representing these hits as the discovery of definite or probable corpses was grossly irresponsible.

I don't remember to what extent the media actively encouraged this misinterpretation, or at least failed to discourage it in their reporting, but a lot of people were under the impression that these GPR surveys provided proof of hundreds of deaths above and beyond those which had already been documented, and/or cover-ups of actual murders.

My name is a snarky reference to the bizarre fixation of the left on the imaginary crime of crossing state lines during coverage of the Rittenhouse case, and has nothing to do with Nazis.

As someone with fairly extensive geophysics experience, GPR is pretty meh and I've always found it weird that it's treated as though it was anything other than a very noisy form of sensing that can only tell you when the subsurface material changes (and even then, the depth and size of the change is hard to ever be sure about). Geophysics is inherently very unreliable when it comes to trying to identify small changes below the surface and I'm very much not surprised that these graves are false positives. Plenty of the actual papers that back up the use of the GPR for this purpose found as much and similar uses, like detecting utilities or animal burrows or cavities is just as unreliable. The effectiveness of GPR also depends on the materials involved, which can reduce your penetration to mere inches.

Do you geophys professionally?

I like to imagine someone geophysing my back yard 2000 years from now finding indications of high heat and excavating my burn pile pit. While interpreting it as some sort of 'ceremonial', offering location.

I've watched too much 'Time Team'.

I did lot in my grad school research, mostly seismic and resistivity. A little professionally afterwards.

Most won't have the resolution to pick up a small, residential burn pit, depending how deep it is anyway. Electrical methods might pick it up, since they're sometimes decent resolution near the surface.

In foundation engineering, finding trash pits and burn pits during development when doing test borings or excavations in long developed areas is pretty common. God forbid you hit an undocumented landfill. That's a good way to get your project delayed ($$$). Sometimes you'll need to have a cultural study done if they think it could be a historical landmark or archeological site, so your idle thoughts aren't too out of line with reality ha.

Could you elaborate a little More on the effects of materials? Does it work at all in wet soils which I imagine absorb microwaves very efficiently?

Well, GPR works based on reflecting em waves, so it runs into the same issues that pure electric geophysical methods and purely mechanical geophysical methods run into. Mechanical challenges like scattering or interference from voids, thin nonrepresentarive layers, layer inversions, boulders, etc. Electrical challenges like water content variations, voids, salt/contamination, etc. They are also generally way lower resolution than the layman would expect.

Electrical methods are generally more sensitive to moisture content, and in my experience, are more likely to detect a change in moisture rather than material (material and moisture are generally correlated). And that's kind of the thing with most geophysical methods, they're telling you when a material changes and by moving your sensing equipment you can see how that change is related to space.

There are GPR "suitability maps" for the US that show vaguely where you can expect GPR to be accurate. I haven't seen one for Canada though, but GPR would be usable in areas with similar surface geology.

Look, I already dinged someone else about this.

It is completely reasonable for you to look at @SecureSignals's posts with suspicion. "Don't engage in ad hominems" does not mean "You cannot consider someone's history when evaluating how credible they are." But this is not the way to express your doubts. Address the argument, and if you find it questionable because of who's making it, you can just wait and see what other people say (usually you won't need to ask for a debunking if there is a debunking to be made). What we don't want is people flinging "Well, of course you'd say that, you're a Holocaust denier" and "You're just saying that because you're a liberal" back and forth.

The OP does not shy away from responding to critics and providing sources (see his other threads). His posts are content-heavy and often use primary sources. I don’t think it’s a good idea if we all start saying “I don’t like this person’s views, can someone from my in-group verify these claims”? If you don’t trust OP then you can wait for someone’s attempted debunk or take on that role yourself, no?

If @do_something had looked at their posting history they would easily have seen that and the length to which @SecureSignals goes to follow the rules of the forum and to engage in constructive discourse.

But that's not what their comment is driven by. It's pure outgroup + cognitive dissonance. They see someone they don't like posting something they don't agree with and they lash out.

People who act like this and the want to get away from them and the degenerative effect they have on discourse are the reason for the motte to exist.

The lack of the usual antagonistic and sneering remarks in Amadans mod post is disappointing for the first time ever. And his validation of the otherization of @SecureSignals and the implication that there might be something 'suspicious' going on is beyond poor form.

If @do_something had looked at their posting history they would easily have seen that and the length to which @SecureSignals goes to follow the rules of the forum and to engage in constructive discourse.

"Goes to great lengths to engage in constructive discourse" is definitely not the pattern I have experienced when interacting with SS (nor, for that matter, has "follow the rules of the forum", though on that count I'm not sure he's actually worse than the median strongly-opinionated-poster here).

Example of the non-constructive discourse pattern of "throw out a bunch of claims, then when those claims are refuted don't acknowledge that and instead throw out a bunch more expensive-to-refute claims" here.

Example of the non-constructive discourse pattern of "throw out a bunch of claims, then when those claims are refuted don't acknowledge that and instead throw out a bunch more expensive-to-refute claims" here.

Downvote all you want but that is exactly the MO I have encountered with him over and over and over again. SS is not a troll, but he is the functional equivalent of one.

Not sure lawyering your way into violating only the spirit of the rules should be that great an excuse to begin with.

The OP does not shy away from responding to critics

Very often with a large amount of obfuscation and playing obtuse to a point where it takes 8 back-and-forths to get a semi-straight answer.

providing sources

Par for the course for a gish-galloper.

Can you not open links? Yes, the summary is accurate. Whatever you think of his agenda and sources, I have never seen SecureSignals post anything he didn't believe was accurate before. Generally if you suspect someone is wrong or lying the onus is on you to debunk them.

I think part of rationality is assessing the reliability of your sources. If you don't have expert knowledge, then you need to defer to other people, and I don't blame do_something for being mistrustful of believing someone who spends most of his time on this site denying the most well documented mass killing in history.

Perhaps, but a larger part of rationality has always been equipping yourself with the tools to assess reliability on your own. But do_something didn't 'defer to other people' they straight up ignored the post and loudly asked for someone else to read it for them. It is an ad hominem argument in its purest form - no attempt at an argument is made, only an appeal to the op's status as a witch, to discredit them without having to bother with discrediting their arguments.

In my opinion, as a fan of the motte and someone who doesn't want it to turn into the rest of the internet, that post is the equivalent of squatting in the middle of the commons and taking a big greasy shit. I don't care how you justify it, I think it makes all our lives worse.

Side note - never forget that in the eyes of the perpetually offended, you are already tainted. You have been since long before SecureSignals ramped up his obsession. No amount of loudly declaring your disagreement with him will save you, nothing can save any of us now.

Oh don't worry, I'm not posturing against the resident Holocaust denier for my own sake. I just think he degrades the quality of the conversation here by bringing every other conversation back to his own pet pseudohistoric topic.

I realise that a place like this is vulnerable to witches and is to some extent a necessary compromise we have to make, but damn is it annoying.

The National Post is one of Canada's two major national newspapers (along with the Globe and Mail). This doesn't count as "expert knowledge" in my mind, and would go a long way towards determining its reliability (whatever answer you end up with).

You are someone. You apparently have internet access. Be the change you want to see and verify if Canadian residential school mass graves have actual bodies found or merely widely reported "Archeologists detected what they believed..." but then no bodies were actually produced.

If you want some background to this story I follow a substack that seems reputable (woke watch Canada). As far as I can tell it's actually a pretty interesting case of the facts not being covered by the msm.

Broadly correct, but I would quibble with parts of the framing.

It's certainly true that the 'bodies' found at Kamloops have never been anything more than anomalies found on ground penetrating radar, and that media and activists have never really made any attempt to communicate this to their audiences. The vast majority of people would never realise that these bodies are entirely theoretical and could easily just not be there. Chalk another one up to the media being bullshitters.

However, what I would disagree with in SecureSignals post is the implication that this stuff therefore didn't happen, or that the backlash against the Catholic Church is unjustified. I personally see the 'graves' at Kamloops as a catalyst for action, rather than the substance of the grievance itself. It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time). Many deaths resulted. Official records from Kamloops say 50 children died there; the true total is likely higher. Though I admit I have little sympathy for the Church to begin with, I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools. You reap what you sow.

  • -12

One of the problems with excusing misrepresentations that you think are directionally correct is that many of the people doing so don't know how their own views have been shaped by lies or misrepresentations, building a new layer of bullshit on top of the old one. For instance:

It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time).

This is how it is often described, but sending your children to residential school was optional.

https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/

Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has helped spread erroneous information. At the final National Gathering in Edmonton, one of the Commission’s information displays stated that, after 1920, criminal prosecution threatened First Nations parents who failed to enrol their children in a residential school. This falsehood, one frequently repeated by supposedly reputable journalists, is a reference to a clause in the revised Indian Act that said children had to be enrolled in some kind of school, a clause that was little different from the Ontario government’s 1891 legislation — nearly 30 years earlier — that made school attendance compulsory for that province’s children up to the age of 14, with legal penalties for failure to comply. Other provinces had similar laws.

And the “criminal prosecution”? The penalty specified by the Indian Act for the “crime” of not sending a child to school was “a fine of not more than two dollars and costs, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten days or both.” And as with provincial laws regarding school attendance, there would be no penalty if the child was “unable to attend school by reason of sickness or other unavoidable cause... or has been excused in writing by the Indian agent or teacher for temporary absence to assist in husbandry or urgent and necessary household duties.”

Now if you lived in a location without local schools residential schools were the only ones available, and the percentage of natives living in such locations was higher. But conversely getting out of sending your children to school was easier than it is today, and indeed native enrollment was low:

In 1921, when the revised Indian Act solidified the compulsory attendance of Indigenous children in some kind of school, about 11 percent of First Nations people were enrolled in either a residential school or a federal day school. By 1939, that figure had risen to approximately 15 percent of the First Nations population, but the total enrolment of 18,752 still represented only 70 percent of the 26,200 First Nations children aged 7 to 16. Not until the late 1950s were nearly all native children — about 23 percent of the First Nations population — enrolled in either a residential school (in 1959, about 9,000), a federal day school (about 18,000) or a provincial public school (about 8,000).

And absenteeism among those enrolled was high:

For most of the years in which the IRS operated, between 10 and 15 percent of residential students were absent on any given day

Day school attendance was far worse. In the 253 day schools operating in 1921, only 50 percent of native students were showing up, and until the 1950s, these poorly-funded, inadequately-staffed schools consistently had absentee rates in the 20 percent and 30 percent range. In the 1936-37 academic year, to choose just one example, attendance in Indian day schools sank as low as 63 percent. The only residential school in Atlantic Canada, at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was established in part because two previously-established day schools had been forced to close due to poor attendance. Some of the reasons for this absenteeism — the movement of families to areas where seasonal work beckoned, the need to help out at home during the Depression, and the opportunity to take labouring jobs left vacant by servicemen — are understandable, and it is worth noting the the TRC Report acknowledges that very few parents were ever charged or convicted for keeping their children out of school. But children who aren’t in school aren’t getting an education.

The punishment for your children being truant was mild, seems easily avoided by giving an excuse like chronic illness, and most importantly hardly ever enforced to begin with. That is not the sort of coercion required to get parents to send their children to a concentration camp. Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were "kidnapped", they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all. That is compatible with them being low-quality schools, it isn't compatible with the insane rhetoric about them that is prevalent today.

Many deaths resulted.

Many deaths resulted from native americans being biologically more vulnerable to diseases like tuberculosis. Is there even any evidence that the death rate of native children at residential schools was higher than the death rate of native children elsewhere? Skimming chapter 16 ("The deadly toll of infectious diseases: 1867–1939") from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it looks like the closest they come to an overall comparison instead of talking about individual outbreaks is this:

https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html

In response to the issues Tucker had raised, Indian Commissioner David Laird reviewed the death rates in the industrial schools on the Prairies for the five-year period ending in the summer of 1903. He concluded that the average death rate was 4%. He compared this to the 4.4% child mortality rate for the ten Indian agencies from which students were recruited for 1902. On this basis, he concluded that “consumption and other diseases are just as prevalent and fatal on the Reserves as in the schools.”

Good finds. Reading those articles seems to indicate that the entire narrative is wrong and this story is one part bigotry against Catholics and one part they are lying to use because that’s what they do.

I wouldn't say the entire narrative is wrong -- regardless of the laws on the books, there was definitely considerable coercion involved in 'encouraging' attendance -- this spin is similar in nature to how the authors of COVID restrictions said things like "nobody's forcing anyone to be vaccinated, we are just stopping them from eating out/leaving the country/etc if they don't".

What is quite pernicious (and I believe originates with the current government) is the spin towards blaming the church (churches actually -- many of the schools were run by protestant denominations, and at least some by non-religious entities) for the issues.

Whoever was running a given school was acting as an agent of the Canadian government -- so that fault for individual behaviour like molestation etc lies with the individuals involved, and the systemic issues (coercion, underfunding, 'cultural assimilation) with the sitting governments. Government has been trying to downplay this since forever, but have suddenly succeeded due to the surge in people who somehow didn't learn about this in elementary school (starting in the late 70s) and think they have discovered some new thing. (which happens to be the government narrative, and has only tenuous relations with the truth) Plus the general propensity for hating Catholics in the water these days I guess.

The Catholics were known to sometimes cover up instances of molestation and other misbehaviour by moving the offenders around and not reporting to authorities -- like many aspects of the story this is bad enough in itself! Yet someone there is the need to invent other things which would be even worse if they were true, but weaken the case IMO considering that they are not.

I guess Id say the systemic issues was just being poor. Which isn’t something your guilty of. It’s not like the Canadian government had unlimited resources. And it sounds like the schools outperformed alternative Options.

Eh, it shades towards Copenhagen Ethics I suppose, but "you touch it you own it" is still pretty valid in this situation. Conditions on reserves (govt related!) and in generally remote areas (not so much) were not great in the late 19th/early 20th centuries -- but if you want to take people away from their homes the bar should be pretty high to ensure that the results are much much better than just leaving them alone. Which very clearly seems not to be the case -- there's the odd satisfied 'customer' of the residential school system out there, but it's legitimately unusual. And normally the super-succesful FN people that you see in business/law/politics had their education in regular mixed day-schools, whether due to not living on the reserve at all or being in the sweet spot of 'reserve too small for its own school' and 'not too far away from regular towns' where it made the most sense for them to go to school with everyone else.

I guess I reject Copenhagen ethics. That’s basically saying we should only build gated communities because then we never interact with the lower class and can’t be blamed for it. Comes up a lot with trade. Like Nike getting yelled at for using cheap labor. Yet those people are better off because the factory is there.

So I disagree the bar needs to be very high. Improving the world should just be improving the world. 21st century mostly leftist ideology leads to worse outcomes.

More comments

I just want to point out you are advocating for violence against innocent people from a story that ended up being false.

Property damage does lead to real death. People depend on property to support their life. In the case of a church people depend on their community church for socialization etc. Even if there are no direct deaths there could be a 78 year old whose community connection are based around that church. Who well life falls apart without it.

I guess it’s good we have a few people from the left popping up. But advocating for violence to innocent people seems radical to me. I could just as easily write something like the summer riots were violent so there’s nothing wrong with fire bombing a lot of Democrat office space. You reap what you sow. Atleast in this case you would have people involved with causing riots and not people with some historic connection.

That being said I don’t even understand what people think is wrong here other than Catholic hate. Your telling me you think it’s wrong that the church with the government educated poor kids?

While you may have a point there about "catalyst for action", what you are suggesting sounds like "It doesn't matter if it's all lies, so long as a conversation was started".

So if some Indigenous woman claims that she was raped, forcibly impregnated, had her baby taken away, and it was sacrificed by the local priest on the altar of the church - that doesn't matter if it's not true, it acted as a catalyst for action and that's the important thing! Because the Catholic Church did Bad Things in the past! Along with the Anglicans, who also operated residential schools, since that was the ideology of the day: give native children a Westernised upbringing so they could fit into mainstream society and be lifted out of primitive superstition and squalour.

Happened to white children as well, there's a long-running similar dispute about mother and baby homes in my country with similar claims of unmarked mass graves. And the movement to send orphan (though often they weren't) British children to new homes in Australia and Canada where they'd become (in time) farmers and settlers but in practice were treated as cheap, disposable labour by the people supposed to be fostering them.

So it's not confined to the Indigenous peoples of the former British Empire/Commonwealth, by any means.

There are certainly grounds to argue about the ideas underpinning that view, and about how indigenous people have been treated badly. But "hey if it's all lies it's okay so long as it's the Indigenous who are telling the lies" is not helping anyone.

Though I admit I have little sympathy for the Church to begin with, I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools. You reap what you sow.

And what of the crimes of the Indigenous peoples when they were the ones ruling the lands? I don't think it was all peaceful running around singing with the animals and the trees. Maybe they reaped what they sowed with karma for wars, murders, and massacres? Or is that a case of "one law for me, another for you"?

give native children a Westernised upbringing so they could fit into mainstream society and be lifted out of primitive superstition and squalour.

Honestly I'd love to get an unbiased, clinical review of what exactly the median life outcomes were of receiving a Westernized upbringing through 'the stolen generation' and/or other equivalents versus remaining in remote communities. I've yet to be convinced that the former strategy didn't actually do more good than harm, though it'd be absolute anathema to actually try publish that.

I think you're being uncharitable by calling this a 'lie'. Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found. It's not great evidence, It could easily be incorrect, it is being treated as proof when it absolutely isn't. But it is evidence, it hasn't been invented, and the underlying atrocity to which this evidence refers is (to a greater or lesser extent) certainly true.

And let's make your analogy more representative of what has happened. If someone found a cave full of suspicious looking bone shards and says "hey we just found evidence of 200 babies that were killed in ritualistic sacrifice" and the Catholic Church says "nuh-uh, Thiose shards are probably from a goat or something, we only raped, impregnated, and sacrificed the babies of 50 indigenous women at that site. And besides everyone was doing it back then, it was really trendy." Well in that scenario I'm less bothered about the veracity of the find and more about the underlying atrocity. And if a group of indigenous people want to take mortal offense at what happened I think that's pretty fair. And if they burn down a church or two, well I don't advocate for that (I genuinely, honestly do not think it is a good thing that churches were destroyed over this), but it's hard for me to feel any indignation on behalf of the Church.

By way of example, let's say Andy viciously insults David's wife in an argument and David breaks his nose in response. I don't think that’s a good or right thing to do - you shouldn't be going around breaking people's noses because they upset you. David should probably be arrested. But at the same time it's a completely understandable and predictable response, and I have zero sympathy for Andy. Now replace Andy with the Catholic Church and David with Indigenous people.

  • -19

Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found.

That's the precise thing we're arguing over; some are saying that it's not evidence, it's blips on ground-penetrating radar which could be any kind of anomaly, and because the tribespeople won't let the ground be excavated, we have no idea if there are 200 child graves or 60 child graves or 50 gopher holes.

But at the same time it's a completely understandable and predictable response, and I have zero sympathy for Andy. Now replace Andy with the Catholic Church and David with Indigenous people.

Which is not what you originally said about it not mattering if it was true or not. Suppose Dave breaks Andy's nose because Tom said "Hey, Andy insulted your wife" but Tom is lying because he wants to get Andy in trouble. Is that okay, then? Is Andy still the bad guy?

I want the truth to come out. If there are 200 graves there, I want that to be known. But someone claiming "There are 200 graves but no you can't check, just believe us" isn't good enough when it comes to a claim like this.

Because there have been similar claims of wrong-doing which turned out to be false and which got the credulous into trouble over jumping the gun:

Sir Cliff took the BBC to court after the broadcaster filmed a police raid on his home in Berkshire in 2014. The footage, which included aerial shots taken from a helicopter, was shown on news bulletins throughout the day.

Officers were investigating an allegation made by a man who claimed he was sexually assaulted by Sir Cliff in 1985. But the singer was never arrested or charged and the case was dropped two years later.

Should I believe the bare word of anyone who claims on here "Psst, shakenvac is a known embezzler and swindler, take it from me, would I lie to you?" and then ostracise you? Wouldn't you like the chance to exonerate your name? Would you find it acceptable if I said "Well my aunt lost a fortune to a swindler, I hate swindlers, so even if it was untrue I think I was still right to splash your name all over social media as a swindler and warn people about you"?

some are saying that it's not evidence, it's blips on ground-penetrating radar which could be any kind of anomaly

Some are wrong. Evidence is "a sign or indication of something". Grave-sized GPR returns 6ft under the ground is evidence of graves. Is it strong evidence? not really. You want more certainty? I don't blame you. But fundamentally, the truth of those 200 graves makes little difference, because...

Suppose Dave breaks Andy's nose because Tom said "Hey, Andy insulted your wife" but Tom is lying because he wants to get Andy in trouble.

It doesnt really matter if Andy insulted Dave's wife on the 13th October 2022 when we know he has done so every other day for the last 3 years. We know what we need to about Andy's big mouth.

It doesn't really matter if Sir Cliff sexually assaulted man X if it's already proven that he assaulted 24 other men*. We know what we need to about Sir Cliff's perversions.

It doesnt really matter if you accuse me of being a swindler with little basis if I am known and proven to have swindled 50 people. We know what we need to about my swindling tendancies.

And it doesnt really matter whether it was 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops if it is already known that thousands of children were kidnapped, abused, had their identity erased, and ultimately died of neglect by the Church. We know what we need to about the crimes of the Church.

*I know this isn't true, I'm making a point.

Grave-sized GPR returns 6ft under the ground is evidence of graves. Is it strong evidence? not really. You want more certainty? I don't blame you. But fundamentally, the truth of those 200 graves makes little difference, because...

Oh holy crap. Ever heard of a thing called "middens"? By your logic, that means that indications of middens are really graves, and it's okay to burn down the buildings of the people who dug those middens because fuck evidence and proof and truth.

At this point, I don't even know how to argue this with you. You seem to be standing firm that you don't care if it's all lies, because it's all in the cause of bashing the Catholic Church. Well, goodnight, goodbye, and good luck to you, and I hope to God you never get into a court case where your fate will be decided on "I don't care what the evidence says, this guy looks sketchy so I say he's guilty and he should go to jail for ten years".

If you want to argue it's all lies, then do so. You are arguing that the 200 graves are lies. Those 200 graves are not "all". they are ~1% of the enormity of the Residential Schools System, for which the church bears serious responsibility, and you have at no point indicated that you dispute the other 99%.

Either Dispute the evils of the Residential Schools, or admit that the Church fucked up.

  • -19
More comments

The truth always matters.

And it doesnt really matter whether it was 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops if it is already known that thousands of children were kidnapped, abused, had their identity erased, and ultimately died of neglect by the Church. We know what we need to about the crimes of the Church.

It matters a lot if 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops of natural causes, and not in greater numbers than would have happened elsewhere, or if they died because they were starved, abused, or murdered. The first would be a tragedy and you can certainly condemn the church for taking them from their homes in the first place, but claiming that the people who ran the schools were literally mass-murdering children is a crime of much greater enormity. "The Church did bad and misguided things in the past in less enlightened times" is not the same as "The Church conspired to commit genocide out of sheer evilness." You don't get to claim the latter (and use it to justify retribution) and then say it doesn't really matter which is true.

The truth always matters.

I never said it didn't. I said it makes little difference. If you'll forgive the invoking of Godwin's law, we could have a spirited debate over whether it was 2000 or 4000 jews were shot in some nameless polish town in 1940. While the truth of that question would matter in some sense, the conclusion wouldn't change the nature of the Holocaust, nor the guilt of the Nazis. Same principle.

but claiming that the people who ran the schools were literally mass-murdering children is a crime of much greater enormity.

Not something that I ever claimed.

"The Church conspired to commit genocide out of sheer evilness."

Also not something that I ever claimed.

Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the death rates in the Residential Schools were no worse than in tribal communities, and the abuse meted out in these Schools was hugely overstated, and that the Church only had the best interests of these poor ignorant savages in their hearts, and every single death was dutifully recorded with a heavy heart and a good Christian burial... Even if we accept all that, the Church was still instrumental in stealing these children away from their parents and expunging their culture and destroying their identities and burying them hundreds of miles from their homes when they died. That alone makes me have zero sympathy for the Church having a handful of cases of arson on their hands.

I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.

  • -19
More comments

Can you clearly state what you think the Church did bad? Kid dying of disease and being buried doesn’t strike me as bad. The mass grave thing seems to be a desire to associate this with far worse things. Are you accusing the church of executions? Otherwise why does this matter.

Complicit in the abduction of children by the Canadian Government, subjected them to emotional and physical abuse, often looked after them pretty poorly, and as a result many children died of preventable diseases. and of course, the whole point of the exercise was to expunge their culture from them. Which is, uh, bad.

I mean, is it really that difficult to see where the natives are coming from?

I think if I kidnapped your child, took him half a world away to learn Swahili and African culture and have that dumb Christianity beaten out of him, and then sent you a letter saying 'Sorry, young Mswati (that was his new name) died of malaria.' I think you'd probably feel a tad aggrieved.

  • -11

We do this every single day in America. What do you think schools in America do? Expunge bad culture teach good culture. The deaths honestly just sound like poor people deaths.

I’m fairly certain the people upset about this incident are the same people shoving pride and blm flags down people’s throats. The problem here just seems to be Christians = bad.

I have no issue with teaching poor people higher culture. Perhaps, I’m not being fair here but I don’t see anything obviously wrong with taking an outgroup and trying to incorporate them into your civilization.

Whether the conditions were particularly bad I don’t know. Would take a lot of study to differentiate.

Expunge bad culture teach good culture.

We used to that. Do you have children in school? We're homeschooling, now.

The view now is that previous attempts to inculcate native peoples with the mindset and skills necessary for survival in western civilization is genocide.

I don't know what definition of genocide was available to them at the time.

I suspect the alternative was a more immediate form of genocide.

The deaths honestly just sound like poor people deaths.

They weren't Poor People deaths though were they? They were Ward of the Church deaths. When you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them.

I have no issue with teaching poor people higher culture.

it was hardly """just""" that. If they had managed to do so without kidnapping, abuse, beatings, and deaths by neglect they'd have far less of a case to answer today, eh?

Whether the conditions were particularly bad I don’t know

Bad compared to conditions back at the tribe? Probably unknowable. They were certainly worse than they could have been. And like I said, when you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them. If you find that too burdensome feel free to not do it. Or engage in apologism for those that did.

More comments

Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found. It's not great evidence, It could easily be incorrect, it is being treated as proof when it absolutely isn't.

I mean this leaves out the important context that the evidence has been debunked by further investigation. And that this is mostly not actual indigenous being upset about it, either.

It's not just the media; various First Nations tribes ALSO trumpet the GPR results as being proof of large numbers of bodies being anonymously buried.

However, what I would disagree with in SecureSignals post is the implication that this stuff therefore didn't happen

What stuff didn't happen? There were residential schools. The conditions there were often bad. They were an attempt to "civilize" the Indians. What didn't happen is large numbers of kids being killed or dying and then being surreptitiously buried to cover it up, and that's what's implied or sometimes claimed outright.

Official records from Kamloops say 50 children died there; the true total is likely higher.

On what evidence do you claim the true total is higher?

I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools.

This is not a standard applied to any other crime. If I had relatives at the Zwaanendael Colony do I get to burn down Nantichoke tribal headquarters?

Were those conditions more awful than the usual condition of native children in their own communities? Was their average death rate lower?

Is that necessarily relevant? For example, if a child was taken from their parents by CPS for their safety and went into foster care with a much more functional family, which offered him a better life than his alternatives with his previous family or in a orphanage or whatever, would that child still not have legitimate grievance if they were mistreated in a lesser way by the foster family?

It’s worth noting that this usually isn’t what happens- conditions in foster care are generally horrific.

Is that still true? I know several foster families, and they seem about equal with other middle class families, aside from greater compatibility challenges.

If they could properly vet, it’s probably no worse. But there are enough families slippping through the cracks that you end up with a lot of dysfunctional people as foster parents.

That depends on your definition of 'legitimate'. (Yeah, I actually just said that.) If 'legitimate grievance' in this context means 'grievances, when proven, used as justification to enact organizational reform of CPS so that no child abuse is committed under their watch in the future', then I think the answer is very obviously yes. Having said that, this is not at all what's happening in this particular case. Let's just be clear about this. This is simply pure culture war, nothing else.

Who judges the mistreatment? The child is likely a poor judge.

The intervention in your hypothetical results in material improvement and better life. Grievance over something you can't change and resulted in better outcomes than non-intervention seems poorly considered. It may make the people who intervened wish they left you with your shitty birth family. Is that a better outcome, if it dissuades future positive interventions?

The poor conditions in their home communities were also the fault of the Canadian government, so relative rates aren't a very convincing argument.

EDIT: Nevermind, I've fallen for the narrative. Death rates at residential schools reached acceptable mortality rates by 1949 (Source Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (PDF), p17, from this website).

(As a sidenote, my thought process was "Why the downvotes? Motteposters are usually smarter than that. I'll show them with FACTS and LOGIC." lol.)

I don't find that plausible at all.

You don't think that the conditions on reserves are the responsibility of the Federal government, or you don't think that they were bad, or what?

How familiar are you with Canadian history?

I find implausible and frankly preposterous the notion that the authority of the federal government and the Church in Canada over local aborigines resulted in an increase of average child mortality among that population. The idea that the average aborigine child had a higher chance of surviving into adulthood before the evil colonizers showed up is simply ludicrous.

Honestly this is what perplexes me the most about indigenous culture war. I feel like one side reads the horrors of colonialism, but then doesn't engage with the horrors of general pre-modern human life.

More comments

What are you talking about? Do you think that they were hopping in a time machine to get to their "home" in the 1860s when they were attending school in the 1960s?

Of course the conditions improved in a hundred years. You've correctly identified that it's simply ludicrous to deny that, but I'm not sure why you felt it was relevant.

In fact, let's imagine an alternate history: Colonization, settlement, and the Treaties happen like normal, but then the native population gets locked in and experiences zero changes in welfare/wealth/happiness/etc. from the pre-contact baseline. Would you think "Wow, the Federal Government is doing a great job. We haven't worsened their nasty, brutish, and short lives at all!"?

Maintaining the status quo doesn't meet my standards, and neither do the (frankly huge) improvements we have done in reality. This goes double when you cast your eye back a few decades.

More comments

Has the Beinoff Homelessness and Housing Initiative Report been discussed yet here? You can read the report here, an executive summary here, and a transcript of the report being discussed on the Ezra Klein Show here.

Released in June, it’s a statewide study on homelessness in California, the largest of its kind in some thirty years. It’s built on “nearly 3,200 participants, selected intentionally to provide a representative sample, and weighted data to provide statewide estimates. To augment survey responses, we recruited 365 participants to participate in in-depth interviews”. No question as to the state of focus: California is just over a tenth of the American population but nearly a third of its homeless population and nearly half of the unsheltered homeless population.

Approximately one in five participants (19%) entered homelessness from an institution (such as a prison or prolonged jail stay); 49% from a housing situation in which participants didn’t have their name on a lease or mortgage (non-leaseholder), and 32% from a housing situation where they had their name on a lease or mortgage (leaseholder)...Leaseholders reported a median of 10 days notice that they were going to lose their housing, while non-leaseholders reported a median of one day.

Other takeaways are that contra claims that homeless populations are traveling to California for warm weather or social services, 90% of interviewed participants said they were from California (and 75% from the same county they were homeless in), and backed it up with various details about their hometowns and whatnot. This also aligns with the finding that only about a third of the homeless even sought out government services, suggesting that most people are not taking advantage of whatever unique government services for the homeless California offers (which aren't good anyway). This overall makes some common sense imo - if you’re so broke you don’t have somewhere to live then your options for travel are likely limited as well.

The paper is interesting as a resource in its own right, but I think it’s most useful combined with the claims made in a book referenced in the Ezra Klein discussion of the report: “Homelessness is a Housing Problem.”

The piece argues that housing costs are the primary driving factor behind homelessness. For those who claim that homelessness is mostly a reflection of insanity and addiction, researchers point out that those things are frequently worse in other states with less severe homeless problems (correlations available in the hyperlink).

For instance, West Virginia has worse poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, but has a homeless problem vastly less bad than California's (0.09% vs 0.4%). The only thing California performs worse than West Virginia on is, predictably, housing costs. Or why does San Francisco, with a poverty rate of 11.4%, have such a worse homelessness problem (0.95%) than much poorer cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, all of which have poverty rates more than twice as high around 23% and homelessness rates around only 0.27%? The clearest answer is the most straightforward: San Francisco is simply twice as expensive to live in (a studio apartment in SF is little over $2k vs a little over 1k for the other three cities). This also lines up with the survey responses, with 89% of respondents saying housing costs were a barrier to them finding housing.

This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens. Jerusalem Demsas compares this to a game of musical chairs: as you take away chairs one by one steadily the slower and weaker kids will find themselves without a place to sit. But if you don’t have enough chairs / are going through a severe housing shortage, of course you’re gonna have a worse chairlessness problem then elsewhere, even if their kids are slower and weaker.

And once you’re out, it can be very hard to get back on your feet. Your credit history is gonna be terrible, as is your appearance. Maybe you live in your car for a while but then it gets impounded because you have nowhere legal to park it and can’t pay for the tickets. Then you’ve lost your shelter as well as your ability to go to a job. From there you’re really in the streets, which is scary - some people may take uppers due to fear of being asleep in public where people can hurt you or steal from you, and thus pick up addictions. Things spiral very fast from bad to worse.

Taken together, these suggest early intervention and a clear policy prescription to build more housing and do what can be done to lower costs - not because every disheveled person on the street is a fresh-faced suburban homeowner waiting to happen, but specifically the opposite - that every poor or unstable person living on the cusp of not being able to afford where they stay bears the risk that it’ll be much harder for them to bounce back from a fall than to sustain where they are.

Interested to hear what other people thought.

As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.

When people talk about San Francisco having homelessness problems, they aren't talking about people that merely lack a fixed address. They're talking about the people living in and defecating on the streets, frequently deranged. People that have defected entirely on societal norms.

Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities. You can build permanent structures on public land and nothing bad will happen. At worst, something bad like a murder happens at the camp and then you'll be kicked out and lose the materials you likely stole to construct your building. You can do drugs openly. At the moment Seattle Police aren't even legally capable of arresting people for drug possession and public drug use.

I don't know if this environment creates total defectors or merely attracts them, it's probably some combination.

I once had a conversation with a gentleman standing around a nightclub exit, who explained that he supported himself while in Dallas from April to October by giving life advice for tips to women who were crying as they left, that he took a greyhound to New Orleans the rest of the year(he didn’t explain what he did there), and that he would live in a cheap hostel when he managed to beg enough.

This man’s lifestyle choices were eccentric, and it’s plausible to me that he doesn’t have the ability to hold down a normal job, maintain an apartment, etc. But he didn’t seem to be the sort to live a lifestyle based on public nudity, drug use, assaulting random people, vandalism, and public defecation. He was polite and normal seeming except for his life decisions when I spoke to him, and more than likely is not on a societal level a problem. I mean, sure, he’d be better off if he was given a free apartment. But that’s not my problem and he isn’t asking for one anyways.

I gave him a fiver for an interesting story and I think that’s a microcosm of someone being low-functioning to the point of not being able to support himself, but not causing problems for others.

he supported himself while in Dallas from April to October by giving life advice for tips to women who were crying as they left

What was his apparent age and how did he monetize giving unsolicited advice to devastated strangers ?

He looked like Morgan freeman with more ‘kindly grandfather’ vibes. I’m assuming that helped.

As far as I know, he straight up asked for a tip and crying drunk girls frequently gave it to him.

Yeah I'm not so sure "homeless man explains how he harasses distressed (and probably inebriated) women as they're leaving a night club for fun and profit" is exactly a heartwarming anecdote...

Never underestimate the power of charm. What may, heard secondhand, or when read on the page, seem to be opportunistic manipulation can, in the moment, take on a transcendent feel, like contact with the divine. Various cognitive twists then immunize the tipper from ever feeling they've been manipulated, even after-the-fact.

Yeah, this guy is self-employed, for some values of "self-employed", and doesn't seem to be hurting people through his eccentric lifestyle.

As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.

I don't think so. There's more than enough room to talk about how to deal with whatever percent of homeless people are the most destructive (probably mental institutions) and also talk about what drives homelessness overall. Being homeless is bad in of itself and whether or not every homeless person bothers us, they are all suffering.

Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities.

Correlation wise, the relevant difference (not just among these three cities but for cities across the country) seems to be the cost of living. NYC and Chicago are much less permissive than Seattle and Portland, clear out homeless encampments and arrest public drug users regularly, and it hasn't made their homeless situation much better. To my understanding the really significant legal difference in the west is just that they can't clear homeless encampments unless they have a place to resettle the homeless too. This seems reasonable enough (and clearances still happen anyway); if you don't have anywhere to put the homeless then you're not actually getting rid of an encampment, just moving it down the road. Likewise, states don't have homelessness because of public drug use (or you would expect states with more drug addicts to have more of this), they have public drug use because their drug addicts live outside.

NYC and Chicago are much less permissive than Seattle and Portland, clear out homeless encampments and arrest public drug users regularly, and it hasn't made their homeless situation much better.

It's far better in NYC than San Francisco. One source gives an unsheltered homeless population of about 4400 in San Francisco in 2022. Here we have a number of 4042 for New York City. New York City has over 8.4 million people; San Francisco about a tenth of that.

No, it's not housing prices.

NYC has very few unsheltered homeless people because it is legally mandated to provide shelter.

Is part of that just that if you refuse to accept help in New York(IIRC there's plenty of it available and homeless are guaranteed shelter there), you die in winter, whereas in San Francisco you don't?

Nah, I've been to NYC in the winter -- they just sleep on the steam grates and/or ride the subway all night.

New York City has enshrined Right to Shelter where the homeless have to be housed, even at high cost hotels if they refuse. The total homeless population for SF is 7,754 and the total population for NYC is 83,649, twenty times higher than the number you cited. On a population basis NYC and SF both have homelessness rates near 0.95%, quite in line for two of the most expensive cities in the country.

And also, come on. Even if you had been right you can't just cherry pick one city and say that overturns the finding that housing costs have the highest correlation with homelessness across the country.

This is a refusal to distinguish between the homeless as officially defined, and the homeless that people think of when talking about the homeless problem.

In fact, most people consider homelessness to be bad unto itself, and the fact that it costs NYC $2.2 billion yearly to manage its extraordinary homeless population is indeed the kind of thing we care about averting through policy. You personally might be talking about something else but this is a conversation about homelessness and how to reduce it. I would know, I started it.

I think a major problem is that there’s a lot of wiggle room for motte and Bailey around the issue. When people want sympathy they talk about a guy just down on his luck. When they want to remove them, they’re drug using street shitters.

I think intervention might only be possible in the early stages though. Once you’ve gotten to the place where you’re drug addicted, haven’t held a job in ten years and are infested with lice, the chances of you getting back to even working class are pretty small.

Any sort of good rule has to recognize both situations and have separate systems for dealing with such.

E.g.

I remember feeling extremely awkward and sorry one freezing winter having to looking at an old couple (65-75) sleeping under a pedestrian bridge in what looked like four sleeping bags (per person) and a big pile of felt insulation. Their campsite wasn't a mess. Then I talked to them and they turned out to be fairly happy. Didn't even have a mess, their kitchen stuff was lined up on the concrete behind their bedding, they had a stove.

They had been evicted, but seemed quite content , they said they had another apartment lined up in two months time and this was strictly temporary. Felt better after that, it made me feel bad going past them twice a day.

I think intervention might only be possible in the early stages though. Once you’ve gotten to the place where you’re drug addicted, haven’t held a job in ten years and are infested with lice, the chances of you getting back to even working class are pretty small.

Yeah I agree. This is crucial though because we're not dealing with a static homeless population, we're dealing with a growing one. Supposedly homelessness has grown at a rate of 6% a year since 2017, so there are many people that could still be prevented from falling into a state where it'll be a lot harder to pull them back from.

I think a major problem is that there’s a lot of wiggle room for motte and Bailey around the issue. When people want sympathy they talk about a guy just down on his luck. When they want to remove them, they’re drug using street shitters.

I agree that people describe homeless populations (indeed, all populations) as more or less sympathetic depending on their own sympathies. But I hardly see how that (alone) has anything to do with mottes / baileys. Not every form of intellectual dishonesty should be shoehorned into a motte-and-bailey framework.

Per Scott:

So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.

As the other replies have said, the vast majority of “homeless” people are unemployed or mostly unemployed people living in their parents’/friend’s/trap house or in their car or couchsurfing. Even the majority of homeless people of no fixed abode aren’t like those living in tents on Venice Beach. These people can indeed be helped by cheaper housing costs or state-subsidized housing schemes. But they also aren’t what is usually meant by the public when talking about the homeless problem.

The problem is with the minority of homeless who are psychotic fent or meth addicted predators. These are the people living on the street in San Francisco or LA and causing problems for everyone else. Demography of the more general “homeless” population isn’t relevant. These are people who deliberately refuse shelters with space because they want to stay on the street to do drugs, offering them housing isn’t going to solve that problem or associated problems with drug-related crime done by people who want a fix.

It seems plausible that the absence of affordable housing for the first type of person creates a pipeline whereby they are more likely to become the second type of person.

This seems likely.

But, in my mind, the biggest thing that turns a type 1 down-on-their luck person into a type 2 pants pooper is the wide availability of fentanyl and heroin on the streets today.

Fixing housing affordability issues seems is a hard problem. Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).

Meanwhile, there are lots of countries with essentially zero drug use. Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Japan have don't have drugs. And unlike the Prohibition Al Capone memes, these countries also have very few if any gangs. We could reduce drug use by a ton and it wouldn't be that hard. All it would take is a serious effort to criminalize drugs.

And before anyone says "War on Drugs didn't work", we should take a look at the overdose stats. Overdoses deaths in the U.S. are up 1000% since the 1980s. The correct take, IMO, is that the war on drugs did work. We just didn't do it hard enough and gave up too soon.

You can get a really shitty studio apartment for something like $150 usd a month in a crappy area of Osaka for example.

Yeah that's a good point. We've made shitty housing illegal in the U.S. That Osaka apartment would almost certainly be illegal to rent in the United States. But another factor is that there is no underclass in Japan. It's not worth renting to the underclass in the U.S. for $150/month because the damage they do to your unit will easily exceed that.

That sort of job does not get a roof over your head in most of the US, and certainly not in high cost cities.

It's worth pointing out that Section 8 government housing allows menial wage workers to get a much nicer unit than the equivalent worker in Japan. But, obviously, as a government program there are a million hoops to jump through.

In any case, the drug zombies on the streets of San Francisco aren't capable of holding a job at all.

I wonder when that changed and why? It used to be a viable business and major cities were replete with flophouses and boarding houses and long stay hotels of various qualities.

They were made illegal by ordinance.

There’s still flophouses. I can go on Craigslist right now and find single bedrooms with access to a bathroom for $500/mo in DFW. If I’m willing to compromise and live in a cubicle, or in the far suburbs, or the serious hood, I can get a lower price.

Now I can afford to not do that, but the point is that the code of tenants rights and housing code and the like don’t stop people in four different counties and who knows how many cities from doing it. Somehow the difficulty evicting when people in the market for $500/mo housing predictably have trouble paying rent doesn’t deter people from offering it.

What does "a crappy area of Osaka" entail, exactly? Presumably the low crime rate means you don't hear gunshots, can leave things outside without them being stolen, etc.

One of the stronger anti-YIMBY arguments is that cheaper housing in your area, specifically, means the people who cause crime, theft, and generally unpleasant things will move in. A subtler argument is that, sure, you can prevent that by enforcing the law and maintaining strict standards of behavior - but politics doesn't support that, maybe it'd be racist, etc.

I'm not sure how true this is. I'm pretty sure marginally cheaper housing - the kind where there are (exaggerated numbers) now 2x as many top-tier apartments, and people love those so their price only goes down 10%, but and that daisy chains all the way to rent being 20% cheaper in less desirable areas - doesn't cause that. And you'd expect new development to, mostly, be that, because developers want to maximize profit so they'll only go as far down the demand curve as competition forces them to. Do mandated affordable units mess with this? My vague sense is no, but idk.

But it might be a stronger argument against zoning that allows a new building full of cheap apartments a tiny bit bigger than a college dorm, the kind that'd cost whatever the equivalent of that $150/month here is.

Even without that, I have a strong sense that the general reaction to the permitting and construction of a bunch of dorm room-size apartments would be negative. Building codes don't really allow it, anyway. Are there any other good reasons to oppose it?

But, in my mind, the biggest thing that turns a type 1 down-on-their luck person into a type 2 pants pooper is the wide availability of fentanyl and heroin on the streets today.

I think it's meth much more than opiates. Opiates can kill you and make you unproductive, but they don't fry your brain and give you psychosis like hardcore simulants do.

And before anyone says "War on Drugs didn't work", we should take a look at the overdose stats. Overdoses deaths in the U.S. are up 1000% since the 1980s. The correct take, IMO, is that the war on drugs did work. We just didn't do it hard enough and gave up too soon.

The main reason overdoses are up is that fentanyl is really potent and easy to overdose on, but it's also the most popular illegal opiate because it's cheap to make and can be smuggled across the border in large quantities because it's so concentrated. If lower potency opiates (and narcan) could be purchased legally over the counter, fentanyl use and fentanyl deaths would plummet.

If lower potency opiates (and narcan) could be purchased legally over the counter, fentanyl use and fentanyl deaths would plummet.

Only if we legalized it the right way, which we wouldn't. Look how we legalized marijuana. See how it's celebrated and commercialized now with billboards and brightly lit stores in every shitty small town in America. If we do the same for opioids, usage will go through the roof - as will overdoses.

I would advocate a method where junkies can, under medical supervision, get free opioids in a super boring and lame way that ensures no one will ever do it for fun. That would have the effect of making street dealers unprofitable while reducing the chance of non-junkies getting hooked. Long prison sentences for dealers will do the rest.

The key thing isn’t the treatment options. Surprisingly opiates are enjoyable and they don’t want to quit and they also don’t want to do it in the environment you describe.

Jailing dealers would do a lot of the heavy work alone. Clearing out the city-center encampments for doing the dope would do a lot. Yes I know you said long prison sentences for dealers but that’s the hard part we have no appetite for right now. Afghanistan solved the dope issue without treatment centers. They just jailed everyone high for a couple months till they were sober.

Also supposedly the Euro countries that did the legalizing thing cleared out the encampments etc. but I don’t see political will in those cities to do that.

Afghanistan solved the dope issue without treatment centers. They just jailed everyone high for a couple months till they were sober.

There's something amusingly ironic about Afghanistan, a country the US military helped to ensure produced large amounts of opiates during the occupation, being capable of solving this particular issue.

Yes, I agree. Clearly strict enforcement is the only real way to solve the opioid problem which is currently killing over 100,000 Americans every year. Every "soft" method has either been ineffective or made the problem worse. But I do think a push/pull might work better than push alone. Giving junkies a way to comply with the law without having to go clean seems like a useful outlet valve for when we do start actually arresting dealers.

If we do the same for opioids, usage will go through the roof

You don't need the dependent clause. We can just do the math (economics). Many moons ago, at the old old old place, I did an estimate, ignoring any effect of removing criminal penalties, ignoring any effect of branding/marketing/whathaveyou, ignoring any cultural or other developments which could change the elasticities, of how usage of marijuana might change in response to the change in price that was observed. Let's just say that anyone who thinks that usage of drugs is going to go down (or even stay flat) in response to legalization is getting high on their own supply. Marginal Revolution just referred to Portugal. The Bloody Atlantic is almost going after Oregon. It was trendy to think otherwise for a while (I believed it when I was a kid), but like most silly lefty trends, at some point the need to shut out the data and embrace cognitive dissonance becomes too difficult.

The question isn't whether drug use will go down; it's whether ODs will go down. I suspect they would; if you know how much you're getting you're not going to OD because your usual hit is 10x the potency.

Of course if you legalized hard drugs the way pot has been legalized in NY or NJ that might not work, but that's because government can screw anything up. You also can't just decriminalize possession (like Oregon did); you have to legalize production and sales.

This line of thinking is tempting as well, that it's just product uncertainty. There may be some factor, but I'm skeptical that it would be the overwhelming factor that a lot of people think. One could easily talk about two movies from this image. In one movie, fentanyl is primarily about product uncertainty, and that has driven a rise in deaths. In another movie, fentanyl is just way more potent and way more dangerous in general, so of course it's going to be higher. But hell, there are still quite a few prescription opioid deaths there; those are chugging along, even though they don't have the same product uncertainty problem. Instead, they mostly fit into the ordering just fine in terms of inherent danger of the substance, regardless of product uncertainty.

Even alcohol is still chugging along, causing deaths, even though there's basically no product uncertainty there. People still try to cram as much as they can into their bodies, just to see if they can and to see if it feels "super awesome, yo". They still party and try different shit, not actually paying all that much attention to what someone is pouring for them or what pill was handed to them. Certainly not carefully looking up the risk statistics of mixing substances and consulting a dosing chart or whatever. Nah, it's, "GET DAT SHIT IN ME AND LET'S GET SUPER HIGH!"

Maybe I'll try putting it this way... the belief that it's just about product uncertainty smells to me a lot like one of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs. Sure, you may be a rich upper class person who can manage to make casual cocaine holiday work in your life, so long as there isn't product uncertainty in your cocaine, but for many many other people, life just isn't like that. Intense addiction, the need to try always-increasing quantities, and frankly low intelligence/conscientiousness is just going to lead to deaths mostly in proportion to how inherently dangerous the substances are. Product uncertainty can play a role, but a more minor one.

Finally, even if acute ODs do go down a little, what is the cost in terms of long-term mortality? During alcohol prohibition, the government was literally poisoning alcohol, and yet the health benefits in terms of long-term mortality and such were much more significant than the acute effects of their literal, intentional poisoning.

More comments

I would advocate a method where junkies can, under medical supervision, get free opioids in a super boring and lame way that ensures no one will ever do it for fun.

Scandinavian way, System shops for drugs? Does it work in Sweden in lowering alcohol use?

Yes. Somewhat.

"In 2016, annual alcohol consumption per capita (for those aged 15 years and older) was 9.2 liters of pure alcohol in Sweden and 7.5 liters in Norway, compared to the European region's average of 10.3 liters."

The monopoly/system shops way of selling alcohol means that there will be no advertising and no discount/bulk buying which would lead to over-consumption.

If we do the same for opioids, usage will go through the roof - as will overdoses.

Usage would go up, but overdoses would plummet because people could dose accurately.

Why do you assume they would? People are dumb and don't pay attention to what's in their chicken nuggets - suddenly they're going to turn into savvy consumers when it comes to doing complex chemistry calculations to determine correct dosing, and batch testing to ensure that the product isn't being stepped on or cut with fentanyl as it often is currently?

they're going to turn into savvy consumers when it comes to doing complex chemistry calculations to determine correct dosing, and batch testing to ensure that the product isn't being stepped on or cut with fentanyl as it often is currently?

This is what junkies do already -- many of them are good enough at it to survive for many years!

If the junk is government supplied/inspected, the whole point is that is won't be stepped on -- inform them of a dose that is unlikely to kill a zero-tolerance user, and let them figure the rest out themselves. They are quite resourceful -- this way if they OD at least nobody will be able to say it wasn't their 'fault'.

get free opioids in a super boring and lame way that ensures no one will ever do it for fun.

But that's exactly why street dealers would still be popular.

And that's why we should arrest the dealers and throw them in prison for decades.

Push/pull works better than just push (prison) or pull (medically-supervised injections) alone.

The report (or executive summary) also cites meth.

31% reported regular use of amphetamines, 3% cocaine, and 11% non-prescribed opioids. Sixteen percent reported heavy episodic drinking.

I realize that meth is probably cheaper per hour spent fucked up, but when you have twice as many tweakers as drunks…

I've spoken to bosses of low-skilled labor who actively prefer hiring alcoholics because if they're drunk every night, they go to bed before 10, and get up at 4 too hung over to go back to sleep, and get to work on time because what the fuck else you gonna do in the morning, and then do their work until quitting time because they don't want to be pressured to take overtime- that would cut into their drinking- so on the whole they're a lot better workers than tweakers or potheads. It's possible that low functionality people do better on booze, at least compared to other substances.

The problem with drunks is that they commit violent crimes (particularly domestic ones) in a way which potheads don't - not that they can't hold down jobs. In most of America, also that it is impossible for non-rich people to avoid driving (rich people can afford taxis) so if you are drinking you are probably drink-driving. Stimulants don't make you as bad a driver as depressants like alcohol.

The problem with drunks is that they commit violent crimes (particularly domestic ones) in a way which potheads don't

At least, not until the potheads turn psychotic. At that point they're perfectly capable of violence.

Fixing housing affordability issues seems is a hard problem. Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).

Making housing perfectly affordable might be a hard problem but making it significantly more affordable than current day california is an easy problem. Just remove the artificial restrictions to building new housing and the market will do the rest.

Fixing housing affordability issues seems is a hard problem. Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).

Most places in the US have "fixed" housing affordability, in the sense that someone who works 2000 hours a year at the real local minimum wage (which may be higher than the statutory minimum if the economy is good) can afford a singlewide trailer home and/or a room in a shared house. AFAIK, the only major cities with good jobs where that is true are in Texas.

Japan has "fixed" housing affordability in the sense that an unskilled worker can afford a room in a SRO, even in Tokyo.

In none of these places is homelessness a major problem.

Just remove the artificial restrictions to building new housing and the market will do the rest.

I used to believe that but I'm starting to have second thoughts. Look at square feet of housing per capita in the U.S.. It's never been higher. California is uniquely stupid of course, but there is lots of housing going up all over the country. But prices keep going up too. This despite interest rates which have made housing less affordable than ever.

Population growth? What population growth? California is shrinking and the U.S. has flat-lined. And yet still housing prices go up.

My personal thesis: Housing prices behave like a meme stonk. They go up because they go up. China proves how far this insanity can go before it hits a breaking point.

Housing is hard because no one knows what to do. On the other hand we KNOW how to stop drug use because we have examples from other countries. We don't have those examples.for housing. Until we get examples of what works it's just, like, your opinion man that building more houses will fix affordability.

Housing is hard because no one knows what to do.

Just be like Houston and don't have zoning or red tape. Housing is affordable and it has an absurdly low homelessness rate, lower than Denmark.

Even Houston isn't immune. Prices have gone up 7.1% per year since 2015 (as far back as I can easily check). Inflation in this period has averaged just 3.1%. https://www.zillow.com/home-values/39051/houston-tx/

But it gets worse. The average mortgage rate right now is around 7%, while in 2015 it was less than 4%.

For a buyer with 20% down, I calculate that the monthly payment to own a home in Houston has increased by 150% since 2015, or a whopping 12% per year. While I'll concede that Houston prices are still quite reasonable, their zoning is not a panacea.

Stonk-bubble mentality can eat any increase in housing supply. We need speculators to feel actual pain to reduce house price increase expectations.

Start by making depreciation not tax deductible unless you can prove that your property actually went down in value. Currently, you can "write down" the value of your investment over 27.5 years. This lets you take a paper loss and pay no taxes all the while your property is actually going up in value.

I don't know enough about this area to have any confidence in this, but:

Look at square feet of housing per capita in the U.S.. It's never been higher

One of the effects of something like restrictive zoning and building codes is precisely to increase square feet per capita. Units per capita or something is probably a better measure. Which doesn't look up to me, although that may just be the wrong graph.

Yeah, you're probably right. Although the graph you sent shows their has been no significant reduction in units/capita since the year 2000. So what changed? Why have housing prices outstripped inflation for decades?

My personal answer to this is that inflation has been systematically understated in official figures for political reasons, and that if you use more rigorous and accurate means of calculating inflation things will line up a bit better. An additional factor would be large financial firms having a real estate strategy consisting of buying up huge swathes of housing stocks and then renting them out - Blackstone is the single largest owner of family rental homes in the USA (or at least they were, and there's this vast and purposefully impenetrable web of holding companies designed to obscure this).

Population growth? What population growth? California is shrinking and the U.S. has flat-lined. And yet still housing prices go up.

We are allergic to actually counting the number of immigrants in this country. We're probably undercounting the population by around 20 million, which would definitely be enough to put upward pressure on housing costs.

But, in my mind, the biggest thing that turns a type 1 down-on-their luck person into a type 2 pants pooper is the wide availability of fentanyl and heroin on the streets today.

Drugs are definitely a factor, but if this were the main driving cause then you would expect to see more of the states with the worst opioid problems, like West Virginia, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, to have the most homelessness, but instead they're in the bottom 10 nationally

East Asian culture cannot be ported over to the West and even if it could be, I would not find it desirable. Those cultures have their own problems, like over-deference to authority and ridiculous work hours. Adopting East Asia style legal approaches to drugs without porting over their culture would not necessarily lead to East Asia style drug outcomes.

Anyway, further criminalizing drugs is a non-starter for me. For me it's an issue of liberty. From my perspective, the war on drugs gives the state excess power over individuals. Yeah, drugs sometimes kill people. Drugs are a tool. Many tools sometimes kill people. I do not want the state to be able to control what I put into my body. The whole idea of it is ridiculous to me and I cannot understand the mental attitude that is okay with it.

Meanwhile, there are lots of countries with essentially zero drug use. . . . China . . . [doesn't] have drugs. And unlike the Prohibition Al Capone memes, [it] also ha[s] very few if any gangs.

I doubt this, given that China is a major producer of fentanyl. I find it very hard to believe that the Chinese megacities don't have their (albeit probably smaller) share of strung-out junkies and losers. There's no magic property of Chineseness that protects against drug abuse or opioid addiction - ask Lin Zexu!

Similarly, I find it hard to believe that there isn't significant organized crime in China, even particular to drug manufacture. Instead I would expect that, in a society without strong rule of law norms and heavily dependent upon petty corruption and personal connections, the crime would just have a blurrier relationship to official power than it has here in the U.S.

There's no magic property of Chineseness that protects against drug abuse or opioid addiction

No, they simply have the state capacity and population buy-in to prosecute drug dealers. It's not a Western country, things are different. They really do have almost zero street drug use or street crime.

This is the kind of thing that is easily falsifiable. Just visit their cities. Many visitors have Paris Syndrome in reverse. Westerners think that crime and squalor are just "part of living in a city" but Asian cities have none of it.

You are of course correct that China does have lots of official corruption.

Yeah, but 3/4 of those are islands. Keeping any sort of contraband out is orders of magnitude easier when the contraband must come in through known ports of entry. Ships and planes can be searched, bags can be searched, and since you don’t have large continuous borders with other countries, the odds of random coyotes and mules crossing in the wilderness unseen goes down substantially.

Maybe drug control can work, but I don’t think we can get to zero without sealing our borders like North Korea.

Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).

Done by for example USSR/Poland - by building more housing (significantly improved via central planning spending in Moscow, in Poland it was mostly reconstruction after WW II and unbreaking economy).

Though note it went by providing enough supply that you can buy house/flat at all and you do not have many families living in a single flat anymore as a standard solution. Also, people getting richer (see prices in terms of how long you need to work for place to live in! Though nowadays things are rather getting worse).

I disagree. Lots of people are poor, very few are meth/fent addicts. Normal people don't end up living in a tent on the sidewalk and doing fent if they lose their job or have difficulty with housing - they rely on their friends/relatives or services available. Methfent addicts do not do this, because they've systematically burnt every bridge they've ever had through stealing and abuse and none of their former friends or relatives will lift a finger to help them anymore - in other words, the addiction came before the financial troubles and exacerbated them.

I think OP might be wrong, but because the number of street junkies and organized thieves are 10x lower than the number of temporarily unhoused / living in cars, a 10% chance of the latter converting to the former significantly increases the rate of the former.

This is why I emphasized in the OP and as well that there are many states with worse drug addiction problems than California but less homeless people. West Virginia, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire are in the top ten worst opioid addicted states but the bottom ten for homelessness. What sets California aside is that their drug addicts (and other low functioning people) can't afford to stay off the streets.

As the other replies have said, the vast majority of “homeless” people are unemployed or mostly unemployed people living in their parents’/friend’s house or in their car or couchsurfing.

Perhaps, but this study is mostly looking at unsheltered homeless:

More than three quarters (78%) noted that they had spent the most time while homeless in the prior six months in unsheltered settings (21% in a vehicle, 57% without a vehicle). Over the prior six months, 90% reported at least one night in an unsheltered setting.

I’ve seen a lot less “unsheltered homeless” people around Houston the last few months. It’s not hard to convince people to leave the streets when the temperature is 100 and the dew point is 75.

Other takeaways are that contra claims that homeless populations are traveling to California for warm weather or social services, 90% of interviewed participants said they were from California (and 75% from the same county they were homeless in), and backed it up with various details about their hometowns and whatnot.

This does not appear to be true. Those numbers are not about where the respondents were "from" but instead where they were last housed, which could even have been preceded by other homeless stints. Elsewhere the report states 34% were born outside of California. I doubt 34% of the homeless in WV were born in other states.

On top of that, these numbers don't start with the problematic homeless population most people are interested in. If I am reading this right, 21% of them have cars.

One of the major problems win any homelessness related study or homeless census is that they only interact with the homeless in shelters and the most agreeable ones on the street. The ones in super-camps in the woods or parks are beyond the resources of most organizations and cities to locate, let alone survey. Additionally, the homeless are obviously highly mobile and move around a city throughout the day, so visiting a particular freeway overpass camp won't capture data about any one in a food tent, public library or a block over panhandling. I don't see why this particular paper is supposed to have solved these sampling issues.

The ones in super-camps in the woods or parks are beyond the resources of most organizations and cities to locate, let alone survey.

This. There are people that live mostly "normal" lives and live in their cars or even in the woods. They're clean, showered, hold down jobs. I've heard of undergrads doing this as well as people with blue collar jobs.

I mean, I'm speaking to my experience in Austin, where you go half a mile from downtown and any undeveloped wood will have a massive 10-20 person camp complete with literally tons of trash and thousands of used needles. This is a hazard that comes up in many new construction projects. For commercial work, it gets dozered into a dumpster or buried on site. For state work, it usually turns into a huge health and environmental hazard requiring more consultants and specialists to document and remove these materials (the new TxDOT campus was delayed for almost a year over this issue).

So in my experience, these kinds of camps are some of the worst for drug abuse and theft just generally the most negative kinds of homeless. But it's also a good point that plenty of semi-functional people don't his as well. Hell, I considered doing this in college to save on rent.

This does not appear to be true. Those numbers are not about where the respondents were "from" but instead where they were last housed

Yeah, the relevance of the stat is that homeless people aren't traveling to California for warm weather / permissible legal regimes, they just become homeless in the areas where they already live. This also raises the relevance of California specific factors like housing costs since these people didn't become homeless under a different state government then switch states, confusing the stats. As @huadpe says, about a third born in other states is fairly representative for a normal Californian anyway.

For instance, West Virginia has worse poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, but has a homeless problem vastly less bad than California's (0.09% vs 0.4%).

The problem with these measures is that they're all looking at these as binary, threshold-type statuses rather than as spectrums where the likelihood of homelessness increases as they worsen. Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of clinically depressed West Virginians and more than their fair share of opioid abusers, but these things are still on a spectrum. Many of the visible vagrants aren't just mentally ill or heavy substance users, they're obviously, visibly stark-raving mad or fentanyl-zombies. Someone that lives a pretty fucked up life and is a functional alcoholic may well be able to maintain a home in a way that the full-on junkie cannot.

Now, that said, I would agree that some of this is going to come down to the fact that a functional alcoholic that does odd jobs is a lot more likely to be able to keep a shack in a holler than afford a condo in San Francisco. From that angle, I'm inclined to agree with the core of the Klein thesis, but I do think it overbakes it a bit by implying that there isn't a distinct that is not merely addicted or simply homeless, but absolutely gone. Even there, I would agree with the Demsas story of spirals being important, and I hear some of that echoed listening to Jared Klickstein tell his story of homelessness and meth addiction, but the extent of the problem in San Francisco and Skid Row seems to me like there's more going on than mere housing prices.

edit - Where I probably disagree most vigorously with the people that think it's a housing problem is on policy solutions. OK, I agree, people have a tough time and wind up spiraling downwards because they couldn't afford basic housing. Perfect, we know the answer - deregulate the shit out of the markets. Allow people to people super cheap housing that's basically just little hostels that they can rent out really cheap. Decrease the regulation on housing standards. Allow windowless rooms. Just have the government stop throwing up massive barriers to entry and the problem is basically solved, at least if the West Virginia example tells us anything. But no, that's not the solution, it's building $200K/unit "affordable housing" in dense urban corridors and moving in crack addicts that will destroy the places and make it miserable for any decent people that might have wanted to live there.

Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of clinically depressed West Virginians and more than their fair share of opioid abusers, but these things are still on a spectrum.

West Virginia does specifically have a higher opioid addiction problem than Cali so I don't think it's really measuring functional alcoholic businessmen-types. Still though, true, it may be hard to measure severity of addiction, and maybe the Californian addicts are just mega addicts/worse than their WV equivalents? That still leaves with a lot to explain in terms of why poverty is so much worse in other places and homelessness so much better.

but I do think it overbakes it a bit by implying that there isn't a distinct that is not merely addicted or simply homeless, but absolutely gone.

I don't actually think they disagree here, there are definitely people beyond all help and who will never manage their own life even if you give them a mansion. I think they're mostly arguing against the reverse extreme, the idea that the homelessness problem can really just be boiled down to drugs to the neglect of other factors with stronger correlations. For instance, re your complaint at the bottom:

Perfect, we know the answer - deregulate the shit out of the markets. Allow people to people super cheap housing that's basically just little hostels that they can rent out really cheap. Decrease the regulation on housing standards. Allow windowless rooms. Just have the government stop throwing up massive barriers to entry and the problem is basically solved, at least if the West Virginia example tells us anything. But no, that's not the solution

They actually do address that as a solution:

EZRA KLEIN: One thing that the Housing First discussion always brings up for me is the question of the second house or the second unit, let’s call it, because you can imagine a world where we have a bunch of, more than we do now, taxpayer-financed homes, tiny homes, shared apartment buildings. Maybe we build things that are more like dormitories with shared bathrooms, that kind of thing.

People then need a place to leave and go to next, right? One thing about a lot of these communities is there are a lot of strictures on them, right? You want to have partners, you want to have your dog there, et cetera. So what happens when people then want to move out onto their own? And do you have a housing market where there are cheap units somewhere for the people who need them?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Mhm.

EZRA KLEIN: And this is a point that many people who focus on housing have made. But we used to have just a lot more midrange housing options. We used to have things that were more like dormitories.

You used to have boarding houses. You used to have things where the building code didn’t make sure that everybody had a bathroom, right, or their own bathroom, and that one of the things that even if you got a lot of shelters in place for, when people then get low-level jobs again, and they have some income but not that much, do they have somewhere to live?

So how do you think about that — I don’t want to call it the middle of the market because it isn’t the middle. It’s lower rungs on the ladder that used to exist, and we kicked out by basically making them illegal to build.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Mhm.

EZRA KLEIN: But it means that even if you do have finance shelter for a while, there’s often a really big gap between that and the next home that is out there for you to get.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: The people in this study, when they lost their housing, had an average income of $900 a month. Likely a lot of that is from social services as well. It may not be from a job. That is not enough money to save up for a down payment or to save up for even a monthly rent in most of the cities that we’re talking about here, or even in the adjoining suburbs. And so there is this real problem of how you bridge the gap to that second place.

And I want to be clear, there’s just not a simple, near-term solution to this problem. And everyone wants that to exist. And it just — it does not exist. There’s not going to be a way to build hundreds of thousands of units very, very quickly of this kind of housing.

But what you explained in your question here is that that is sort of like a manufactured problem. So SROs, single room occupancy hotels and housing options were a real problem when we think about housing quality. And people had the correct intuition that it’s unreasonable to say just because you are living in poverty, that you have to live in a place that is so run-down, so below code that no one would allow their children to live there.

And the problem is the policy response says, OK, we’ll just ban that type of housing. We’ll just say you’re not allowed to build that sort of thing anymore. And that will solve the problem.

But you can’t ban poverty, right? There are going to be poor people. And if there was an alternative outside of an S.R.O., they would have already been living there.

So there’s not really an alternative to saying, how do we make sure that there’s a bunch of cheap options that exist in the market, and saying, what we’re going to do is we’re going to outlaw all cheap forms of housing. I don’t think that that means we need to accept the kinds of housing quality that we saw in S.R.O.s, in the ’70s in New York City. I think it’s very clear that there should be some level of subsidization that we can have, and code enforcement that we can have to make sure that those are up to code.

But we have to accept that there’s going to be housing options to ensure that poor people are not on the street, that there are housing options for people who are low income. And what that means is that those are not going to have as nice amenities. It means that you might have to share amenities with people. One of the recommendations in this report is to explore shared living arrangements for people.

Yeah, that's a pretty good reply! I actually listened to the podcast, but it was back when the episode came out and I thought I recalled it being much more heavily in the direction of acknowledging the policy problem, but then shifting back towards trying to determine how governments should subsidize this. My basic position on government housing subsidies is that they always result in increased aggregate housing spending, usually drive up the lowest-cost options, and are generally inferior to simply leaving people to their own devices with nothing more than really basic guidelines in place.

Yeah agreed. Imo there's probably room for a healthy mix (kind of unavoidably for those homeless who do actually need to be in the equivalent of a mental institution) but I also assume it's cheaper/more efficient if a lot of it happens on the market.

I mean, section 8 kind of obviates the need to build shitty tenement houses for people who can't afford anything else, doesn't it?

I think it certainly could hypothetically (and would be better than just "worse" market rate stuff), but it's the same problem really: public housing gets blocked by zoning restrictions just like all the other housing, even moreso.

Building subsidized housing—or for that matter, market rate rental housing—is illegal in most parts of the U.S. Local zoning laws prohibit structures other than single-family detached homes on the majority of land across cities and suburbs.

Well yes, in the world we live in there simply is not enough housing to meet demand. But ‘building more section 8’ seems like a strictly superior option to ‘building krushchevskys’ and much more likely to happen.

No disagreement, I'm fine with more section 8 and I've said somewhere else in this gigundo thread that I think there's a role for a healthy mix of both public and private solutions. There's plenty of room as well for a less regulated housing market though that doesn't actually include tenements or really cruel situations either. I'm thinking of stuff like the requirements that American buildings have two fire escapes without evidence they result in less fire deaths, regulations that make it way cheaper to build under five stories unless you're going to make a mega high rise, all the way to laws against Accessory Dwelling Units that keep you from renting out spare rooms or converting your garage into an extra room (the latter were cited in particular as a solution that might make it easier for people to house their temporarily homeless relatives.)

This is kinda pedantic but even krushchevskys at the time represented an increase in amenities for a lot of people who had never had indoor toilets or running water. A lot of them are still around today, some quite nice after remodeling, the kind of thing young PMC might be renting.

Sure, I totally agree that cutting regulatory red tape on the housing code would reduce rents and that that’s a good thing.

I would agree that some of this is going to come down to the fact that a functional alcoholic that does odd jobs is a lot more likely to be able to keep a shack in a holler than afford a condo in San Francisco.

Eh not necessarily. A big chunk of the legal profession is pretty fucked up, often including abuse of one or more substances (prescription pills, alcohol, illegal narcotics, you name it) and still manages to hold down a job at Manatt, or whatever.

Your functional alcoholic construction worker when he feels like it(sheet rockers and painters in particular are notorious for this) type is simply not going to, though.

The piece argues that housing costs are the primary driving factor behind homelessness.

It is right, but wrong. The problem is more about where homeless people want to live, which is in premium areas. Look at where your typical homeless encampment is, then ask yourself, "if there was a studio apartment in this location, what would rent be?" The answer is always "astronomical." Most US cities actually have lower population now than in 1950, yet they still have homeless people, along with lots of unused housing stock. How can this be? Because that housing is not in the urban core, instead they are abandoned, formerly working class, neighborhoods who's sons and daughters moved to the suburbs, and the people moved to Florida/died. Why don't the homeless live there? The housing is already there. It is cheap/free, it had plumbing at one point, and could get it again, etc. They don't live there because those neighborhoods are for relatively hard working people who are willing to do a 20 minute commute on a bus/rail. Which the homeless are not.

There's not enough density in those cheaper areas to survive as a homeless person. Less traffic to beg at, fewer dumpsters to go through, fewer bikes to steal.

A bit uncharitable, but I think there is some truth to this, which is why housing doesn't fix the problem. Only raw force can fix the problem.

If you live in eastern Europe, you observe the threat of 'raw force' in action regularly.

City I live in has a modest (~1500 m^2) underpass with a little shopping downtown. A fifth of the time I pass through there I see the cops giving a talking to some crusty looking homeless types. You almost never see any homeless camping out in the underpass being loud & smelly & visually offensive. (a lot of them seem to have piercings, studded clothing or wear leather shit)

Haven't seen them actually beating anyone but Czech beat cops go around dressed in a very militarised fashion and they will happily use force if talking doesn't work.

And if the beat cops aren't up to the task, every city police department maintains a riot company of feisty young cops who relish the odd chance of getting into a serious fight with a band of football hooligans.

pictured: on the left, state police cop, on the right a municipal police officer from the covid era. Town cops are the lowest, least respected, paid and qualified form of cop life. (you should see what people say about them on police forums,lol). About 66% of applicants to state police force are disqualified on personality grounds.

/images/16922797215488982.webp

Surely you know this sort of post isn't allowed. I'm removing it, and banning you for a week.

This is particularly frustrating, since you have another post downthread that has already garnered a couple of AAQC nominations, and you have a past AAQC--which is what stopped me from permanently banning you. @Skulldrinker's comment is a bit low effort, but that's what the report button is for. Please, in the future, use that instead of responding with low-effort antagonism.

I saw what the person wrote, it was basically just something like "what a shitty post", referring to Skulldrinker's one, except with more invective. I think that removing the post is bad because it prevents people from seeing the reason for the ban. I also think that banning the user for a week is excessive unless he has a very strong history of making such posts. I've never been banned for more than 1 day for making similarly angry and insulting posts.

I agree that it's better for it not to be hidden: I think a relatively valuable part of mod actions is showing the community standard to everyone else who happens to see it, and for that to be possible, having the bad comment visible helps.

How is my post low effort? Did you mean to tag skulldrinker?

Ugh, yes. My apologies; I've fixed my comment.

Yes. There are some cities that dont fit the trend, but the midwestern cities in question have the same problem, just less of it. Homeless people in all cities occupy prime real estate. Even if SF had a bunch of cheap housing, the homeless people would not leave their current positions for it. Cheap housing, will be, by definition (almost), be away from the fun stuff where lots of people congregate. Homeless people want to be where the non-homeless people are.

My contention is that you would get a bit cheaper housing, but it wouldn't change the homeless situation much, if at all. Midwest cities have less homeless because they don't accommodate them as much. In Chicago, I've seen a massive increase in homelessness in the urban core in the last 5 years. The only thing that has changed is they are more accommodated by CPD and the powers that be.

Because that housing is not in the urban core, instead they are abandoned, formerly working class, neighborhoods

Such neighborhoods basically do not exist in California.

How can that be? California clearly had vast manufacturing in the midcentury. Where’d the people in this picture live?

At some point, there had to be working-class housing. Unless it was absorbed into Los Angeles sprawl and gentrified, or demolished, it ought to be there somewhere.

California mid century population was a third of today’s official population, probably a quarter of actual one. Moreover, during mid-century, there were more people per housing unit on average, and there were far fewer single person or two person households.

This means that the mid century California housing stock is pretty much irrelevant for the discussion of today’s housing woes, because it’s only a small fraction of today’s housing stock. The working class neighborhoods of 1950s California are places like Santa Clara or Fresno today.

That’s crazy. I didn’t realize how much it has grown. And more people per unit, when CA cities are known today for squeezing people in?

I wonder how many of those midcentury workers were agricultural. Oversupplied in Steinbeck’s time, their market value seems unlikely to have gone up as they compete with automation and immigrant labor. Combine that with a tripling or more of population…

TFR rears its head here- a very large percentage of the fifties population were children, who in the fifties shared rooms and didn't expect personal space, thus creating very little demand for housing. Today san fran has almost all adults, most of them single, who generate much more per capita demand for space and housing.

Not following how this is a fertility problem, rather than a general "more people" problem. If anything, don't kids increase (the parents') demand for space? That's one of the textbook motivations for the development of suburbs.

I read it more as that pure headcounts suffer from a lack of comparability if the age distribution is very different. For extreme examples, a family of 5 with 2 parents and 3 kids will use a lot less space than 5 single working age adults that have their own flat each, especially if they live in the same area.

More comments

A lot of the gateway cities which are now completely indistinguishable from any other part of the generic LA sprawl - Norwalk, Artesia, Cerritos, Cypress - which connect LA to Orange County were unincorporated farmlands as recently as the mid 50's. That's to say nothing of the further reaches of the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. That was all agricultural or undeveloped as recently as the 70's.

Also a lot of the housing stock in heavily-immigrant communities is oversubscribed; lots of people try to save on housing expenses by cramming multiple families or large numbers of young men together into a 2- or 3-bedroom house or condo, sleeping in shifts or otherwise living cheek-by-jowl in time-honored tenement-immigrant style.

In that picture? In Inglewood I guess. Population 100k, median home price 700K.

They lived in most of the neighborhoods in south-central LA - Inglewood, Hawthorne, South Gate, Bell, Compton, North Long Beach, etc. After the 60's riots most of these areas became heavily black, and now, after a lot of really nasty, but largely unreported interethnic conflict, they are mostly (with a few exceptions) latino.

It should in San Fransico. The city's population is less than in 1950. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/population

LA is probably its own beast. But it still holds that the homeless encampments in LA are, mostly, on extremely valuable land. And my suspicion is that if you built a bunch of row houses in Crenshaw that you would not solve the camp situation.

Your source is re the SF Metro Area, not the city of SF. And it says that the metro pop was 1.8 million in 1950 and 3.3 million today. As for the city itself, per the Census Bureau, the pop was 775K in 1950 and 875K in 2020.

Many camps are on valuable land, no doubt about it ( although some are on sidewalks where you can't build anything and others are under freeway overpasses). Nevertheless, there are no depopulated working class neighborhoods in California, or at least I've never seen any in all my travels through the state.

I've seen people saying this and I guess it is plausible because California has grown so much since the 60s compared to other places with Democrat-dominated metros. There is probably places to put housing in the central valley and the like though. But no one would use it.

The central valley is largely farmland. There are big cities there (Fresno, Bakersfield) and houses are cheaper there but still roughly 400k. There's no empty neighborhoods and those towns are truly shitholes - which goes to show how much demand there is.

Houses in Fresno or in the sticks in the CV?

In Fresno. The sticks in the CV is almond farms.

More comments

I’m at work right now and unable to read the whole report at this time, but the question that jumps immediately to mind is: How many of the people surveyed are so-called “hidden homeless” - people who are couch-surfing, living in their cars, staying with a succession of family members and friends without officially establishing a long-term residence, etc. - versus the “chronic homeless”, i.e. the ones living on the actual streets?

If I lost my job tomorrow, I feel like I could find a new one fairly quickly, but let’s say for some reason I couldn’t. I have some savings that could get me through for a while, and even if I didn’t, I have a network of family and friends on whom I could rely on temporary financial/housing assistance.

So, even though I live in a very high-COL major city in California, that cost of living would not result in me living in the street unless a ton of other things went wrong in my life simultaneously. Namely, I would have to burn bridges with a lot of different people in my life in order for things to get to that point.

Even if my entire family and social network were much poorer than they are, presumably they would still have couches I could sleep on and bathrooms which I could use to shower and shave. They wouldn’t let me get to the point where I’m a filthy bum sleeping on the sidewalk.

So, yes, I can fully understand how high COL could contribute to a larger number of “hidden homeless” - functional individuals who are down on their luck and temporarily relying on help from others - but I don’t think it does much to explain the proportion of homeless people who become “chronic homeless”; these people must have been real fuck-ups to have exhausted the generosity of all of the people in their lives who could have pitched in to prop them up while they get back on their feet. Again, I understand that people who grow up in an impoverished family/social situation have a smaller pool of assistance to draw from, but I still don’t understand how a person with family and friends ends up out on the streets unless they have consistently done something to wear out their welcome with the people who could have at least provided the bare minimum support, namely a roof over their heads.

Some examples of how someone would wear out their welcome with the people in their lives: chronic alcoholism/drug abuse, stealing from others (like, for example, to feed the aforementioned alcohol/drug habits), domestic violence/threats, being so mentally ill that you’re considered a liability by others, being generally insufferable to be around, etc. People get to the point where they give up on helping you because their investment is wasted, and they can’t bear to be responsible for you any longer.

So, I don’t know to what extent high COL explains those people. Again, I haven’t yet read the report, and maybe it explains a lot of this stuff.

As much as I sympathize with your individual plight, I don’t think it counts into the “homeless problem” in the society’s view. Shelters or non-profits or churches might be interested in helping you, but people like me (normal, well-off, employed people with families and mortgages) do not care about you much. Indeed, there are a lot of poor and struggling people on this planet, and I can’t spare too much energy or emotion on you.

Instead, what I see as an actual problem is crazy, unpredictable, aggressive hobos taking over the commons, and making the city dangerous and unlivable for normal people, while collectively consuming more government resources per capita than the poorest working people actually subsist on. This is the problem for me, because it actually affects me in a substantial and negative way.

My point here is that you are or were not like them, and it is unlikely that any solution that applies to one group will also apply to the other. The hidden homeless are overlooked on purpose, because they are only a problem to themselves, not to anyone else.

Shelters or non-profits or churches might be interested in helping you, but people like me (normal, well-off, employed people with families and mortgages) do not care about you much.

Be that as it may, some of your tax money is already being used to, supposedly, help the homeless. I am not sure what you would prefer, but you can of course support not spending tax money on this. If you do support spending tax money on it, then there is a question of whether it should be spent as it is currently being spent, or whether more of it should be spent to give the homeless housing.

Thanks for your perspective, voted for AAQC.

This perspctive is what I agree often gets missed when we talk about homelessness. It's strange to me that even when a strong study is presented that says hey, maybe homelessness is about, you know, HOMES, so many people here immediately jump to drugs and shitting on the street.

The real problem is that housing, a basic human need (maybe right depending on your beliefs) is denied to many because they simply cannot afford it. And this isn't a complex problem like many try to make it out to be - as others have said, if we just stop artificially constraining the supply the market will help solve the problem. It won't fix it entirely of course, but not shooting ourselves in the foot repeatedly is a good start.

It's strange to me that even when a strong study is presented that says hey, maybe homelessness is about, you know, HOMES, so many people here immediately jump to drugs and shitting on the street.

Because it amounts to a bait and switch. The people pushing this study have preferred policies about subsidized housing, and they're using the claim that the homeless problem can be solved with those policies to push them. But the "homeless problem" as most people understand it isn't about people couch-surfing or living in their cars or even illegal immigrants making camp near Home Depot; it's about the drug-addled street shitters who make life miserable for everyone else. And you can't fix that with homes; you can give those people homes and they'll wreck them in short order.

But the "homeless problem" as most people understand it isn't about people couch-surfing or living in their cars or even illegal immigrants making camp near Home Depot; it's about the drug-addled street shitters who make life miserable for everyone else. And you can't fix that with homes; you can give those people homes and they'll wreck them in short order.

I see it as a nuanced problem with more than one solution. Ideally we strictly police the defectors ruining the commons, but at the same time we tackle the issue that is creating them in the first place.

Personally I'm for stricter policing of public spaces, crackdown on illegal opiate/meth dealing, and building more housing. Just because we do one doesn't mean we can't do the rest.

"Fixing the root cause" is the standard leftist answer to all our intractable problems, and as can be determined by "intractable", it doesn't work. The root cause of street shitters simply isn't high housing costs anyway.

The root cause is something close to personal responsibility and lack of religion, in my opinion. I hope to fix that too. But again, you're reducing me to one view.

We can do all of the things I mentioned above and also push for personal responsibility and the importance of religious belief.

What do you think the root cause is?

I don't know what the root cause is. If we found it, I doubt we could do anything about it -- maybe 4000 people out of 4 million are just irretrievably broken by the vagaries of chance. I think the main priority should be containing the problem.

More comments

I mean, true, but the ability to be obscured by lots of people who just can’t afford a house provides cover preventing these people from being beaten by the police/arrested/otherwise persuaded to change their ways.

They aren't obscured at all except by those deliberately conflating them. And it isn't that preventing them from being beaten or arrested; it's another part of the leftist memeplex, a part I'm more sympathetic to (though getting less so).

As for those who just can't afford a house, I have no sympathy. If you can't afford San Francisco because the prices are too damn high, there are 332 cheaper cities with populations over 100,000 that you could move to. I can't afford to live in SF either, why should I subsidize those who are living there without a fixed address?

There’s also the factor that high COL localities tend to have many more people in lower working class households, so the family and friends of lower working class people in San Francisco simply have less ability to put up a down on their luck friend or relative because their houses and apartments are overcrowded already.

I think you're also overlooking that low-functioning-but-not-cartoonishly-deranged people are simply incredibly frustrating to deal with when they won't get their shit together and insist on abnormal behavior. People who could solve most of their problems with "just be normal" don't get much sympathy as page five news stories about floridaman, and in real life they wear out their welcome pretty fast. Not by pissing people off, not by doing drugs, not by getting in fights and causing property damage, but just by needing a helping hand because of their own poor decisionmaking and frequently enough refusal to do mildly unpleasant or boring things.

How many of the people surveyed are so-called “hidden homeless” - people who are couch-surfing, living in their cars, staying with a succession of family members and friends without officially establishing a long-term residence, etc. - versus the “chronic homeless”, i.e. the ones living on the actual streets?

Here's their breakdown:

More than three quarters (78%) noted that they had spent the most time while homeless in the prior six months in unsheltered settings (21% in a vehicle, 57% without a vehicle). Over the prior six months, 90% reported at least one night in an unsheltered setting.

re:

Namely, I would have to burn bridges with a lot of different people in my life in order for things to get to that point.

I think it definitely remains true that becoming homeless doesn't require just having lost your house, but probably having lost your friends as well. This is part of why I described (I should probably clarify this is my own take rather than the study or podcast's) that we're talking about a demographic of pretty low-functional people that are near the bottom of society in general. But clearly in states with twice as much poverty, worse opioid problems, etc, if these people can afford a place to stay it makes a pretty siginificant difference in whether they'll wind up on the street, where their pathologies will become a public nuisance/safety issue, and where it becomes significantly harder to get someone back from after they've landed there.

I wonder how much of California's homelessness problem stems from a large portion of their population being transplants? West Virginians today are pretty much all descended from people who lived in West Virginia in 1950 and so have nearby relatives, whereas Californians very frequently are descended from people who didn't live in California in 1990 and so have few to no nearby relatives.

That's a good point, I'm not sure. Here's what I dug out of the paper though not sure if it really answers our question:

Overall, 36% of participants had sought help to prevent homelessness, but most sought help from friends or family, rather than non-profits or government agencies...

Seeking support was more common for adults in homeless families, where 61% sought assistance. The most common sources of support sought across all participants were friends and family (22%); community-based organizations, religious organizations, or domestic violence services (16%); and government agencies (8%) (Figure 20). Adults in families sought help from any source more frequently than single adults and TAY.

Twenty-three percent of all participants received help. Adults in homeless families were more likely to receive help; nearly half (48%) of adults in families received help of any kind (compared to 21% of single adults and 24% of TAY). The most common reported types of support received were from friends and family, community-based organizations, and government agencies. Adults in families received help from any source more frequently than single adults and transition age young adults

More remarkably, for where people stayed the previous night:

More than three-quarters of participants (76%) stayed in unsheltered settings the night prior to their interview; 20% stayed in a vehicle, and 56% without a vehicle. Nineteen percent stayed in an emergency shelter, 0.3% stayed in a domestic violence shelter, 2% stayed in a motel, hotel, or trailer paid for by the government or an organization (e.g., as part of a COVID program), 0.1% stayed in a motel or hotel paid for by self or family, 1% stayed with family or friends, and 0.5% stayed in institutional settings, such as hospitals or jails.

If people had been homeless for less than six months, we asked where they had spent the most time during their episode of homelessness. The responses were similar to where participants had been the previous night: 78% were in unsheltered settings (21% in a vehicle, 57% unsheltered settings without a vehicle). Fifteen percent reported that they spent the most time in an emergency shelter, 0.3% in a domestic violence shelter, 2% in a motel, hotel, or trailer paid for by the government or organization, 2% in a motel or hotel paid for by self or family, 0.5% in a substance use treatment program, and 2% with friends and family.

In fairness, at this point we're interviewing a group of people who've lost all ties with friends / family, whether they had them to begin with or not. Lower down it suggest these people did have connections but their family and friends were just unable to accomodate them for one reason or another:

Families and friends can be a source of housing support for many individuals, providing places for individuals to live. But many participants noted that their family or friends were not able to provide a place to stay (Figure 36). Half (51%) of all participants noted that their family and friends were unable to accommodate them, with 39% noting it as a barrier that impacted them a lot. This issue was more frequently identified as a barrier among transition age young adults (70%, with 53% indicating it impacted them a lot) and adults in families (65%, with 57% indicating it impacted them a lot) than single adults (49%, with 37% indicating it impacted them a lot). This finding could be because family or friends do not have space or resources for the participant to live with them, or because rental agreements for market-rate or subsidized housing may limit the number of residents permitted to reside in a unit, or the length of time a guest is allowed to stay there.

This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens.

So I suppose they're also low-functioning to the extent that they're unable to, you know, move to another state with a much lower average cost of living for whatever reason.

I think this is one of many situations where the typical high-functioning individual underestimates how hard this kind of thing is for the median person, much less the actual underclass. The monetary costs, mental barriers, and organization required to simply move from California to Kansas while maintaining employment and arranging the housing transition well aren't trivial for most people. If someone has already pretty well cratered their situation by alienating a bunch of friends and getting evicted, there's no way they're smoothly making it to the storied paradise of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

I think this is one of many situations where the typical high-functioning individual underestimates how hard this kind of thing is for the median person, much less the actual underclass.

Yeah, I think that probably people who have severe mental issues are not even capable of walking a few blocks to fill out an application at a government office, or doing it over the phone or online. For them doing something like that is literally as difficult as it would be for me to go pass a test in quantum mechanics right now or climb Mt. Denali right now, given that I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics and have no background in mountain climbing.

If someone has already pretty well cratered their situation by alienating a bunch of friends and getting evicted, there's no way they're smoothly making it to the storied paradise of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Yeah, realistically speaking one would have to catch oneself in one's descent at the point when one still has enough money and mental clarity to be able to pull off the move to Cedar Rapids. But based on my personal experience, I can say that the thought of leaving the area you know and moving someplace you know almost nothing about and know nobody in, just because you cannot afford to stay where you currently are, is very daunting. For me the natural psychological tendency was to try to fight and struggle to stay where I was, and kinda hope that everything would work out somehow. The idea of moving to some other town where you know nobody, in this kind of mental state, can feel very scary and also can feel like a defeat. So I can imagine that some people probably do not actually muster up the willingness to move until they have already blown through too many resources to actually be able to make the move.

If you're low functioning enough to struggle to maintain housing/job, that makes it easier to move, not harder. We're not talking about people who have an established career path or a mortgage or are pillars of their community. If you just lost your burger flipping job and are getting evicted and don't have any friends... Nothing is keeping you anywhere, other than inertia! Pack a suitcase and get on a bus.

(This is, of course, how a lot of people end up in California in the first place.)

It's very easy to forget how, for the lack of a better word, stupid a lot of people are. Most of us here are stuck in bubbles that are probably 1SD above the mean IQ. There are similarly-sized bubbles of people with mean IQ 1SD below the mean. You need to work in a DMV, a Walmart, an ER ward to see a more representative cross-section.

Someone who's IQ 85 can lead a relatively successful life, as long as it's stable. They have a bunch of recipes in their head: go to work, pay your bills, go grocery shopping, find a job that is similar to the old one, find an apartment that is similar to the old one. A thought like "even though the wages are lower in a town like Wichita than here in Frisco, the cost of living is so much lower that my discretionary income might even increase if I move there and continue working 25 hours a week in a fast food kitchen. Therefore, it might be prudent to cancel Netflix and start saving up to afford a move to a flyover state by the time my lease is up for renewal. Where should I move to? I should go on Facebook and see if any of my old acquaintances are willing to talk to me. Maybe one of them will even help me find a new apartment there" simply won't fit into their head.

Someone they trust has to break it down into digestible pieces, cram it into their head and come up with a new step-by-step recipe. If they don't have any relatives or friends to keep an eye out for them or they all are equally stupid, they will stop paying for their apartment, lose their job and end up in the streets.

You're talking to the wrong guy here, I've worked menial jobs before where they would honestly hire anyone with a pulse. My current job is physical labour and though it's more selective you do still wonder how some of the guys dress themselves in the morning. And I don't think it's necessarily stupidity here. There are plenty of dumb as bricks people who actually find life fairly simple so long as they remain on the rails for as long as possible. They're generally incredibly boring and safe and rarely end up as drug addicts.

Rather it's impulsiveness we're talking about. People who just want to have fun. And they're not going to move to Wichita or become fiscally prudent. They're not going to abandon parties and drugs and cool people for Netflix and sensible dinners and the conscientious.

Can you describe - in a detailed manner - what it is like to be a person with 1) social IQ 1 SD above the mean, and in a bubble of same and 2) social IQ 1 SD below the mean, and in the same bubble? Are there "high-social-IQ" strategies that people are using that the socially impaired can't quite pull off? Social isolation is a kind of poverty trap and has the same dynamics.

I have no idea how to measure social IQ, EQ or whatever it's called.

I doubt social IQ bubbles even existed before the internet, various incel forums are probably the closest thing to one. Monasteries, maybe? High EQ monks would climb the hierarchy, becoming priors, abbots, hegumens and bishops, while the rest of the brethren would be content to toil and pray.

Hmm. Incel forums are one example. IRL...hmm. For low social IQ, engineering departments, maybe, although that's complicated by the fact that Aspies can socialize and network OK enough among themselves but flounder when interacting with normies. I've heard tales of technical departments with lots of sperg-engineers, a smaller number of half-sperg liasons, and then a bunch of normies using the sperg-engineers' products. Maybe MIT, half-jokingly described as the largest sheltered workshop for autists in the US, has some of these bubbles.

For high social-EQ bubbles? I'm pretty sure you can find lots of them in DC...lots of bushleague politician types and strivers looking to become more connected.

I specifically avoided mentioning places like MIT and FAANGs on one hand and NYT and various DC-adjacent think centers because they are high-IQ bubbles first and foremost.

More comments

Probably, or just too poor, or that would remove them from family members they can occasionally borrow money from or w.e.

Are they basing the poverty rates on a national income cutoff rather than a local cost of living standard? I bet dollars to donuts they are, and until that's corrected for, I don't know why I'd waste additional time entertaining the argument.

...measuring homelessness against housing costs is, of course, measuring against a local cost of living standard. That's the whole point of the study and this conversation. Apply your knee jerk judgment to a sample of areas though and tell me if you think they're incorrect in which areas they label as poor:

Colburn and Aldern note that some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: “Homelessness is abundant,” the authors write, “only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment—booming coastal cities.

Here's another study measuring income relative to CoL if you would like:

A main finding of the study is that the expected homeless rate in a community begins to quickly increase once median rental costs exceed 30% of median income, providing a statistical link between homelessness and the U.S. government’s definition of a housing cost burden


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats