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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   22004 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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We have also created an Israel-Gaza Megathread for your convenience.

There is an Israel-Gaza Megathread now.

Thanks, meant to post it there.

RFK Jr announced this morning that he was leaving the democratic party and would continue his campaign as an independent.

I've spent a bit of time reading through articles and hot takes, and the overarching theme seems to be some variation of:

  • No real democrat would ever vote for him

  • He's more popular with Trump people anyway

  • This changes nothing, or maybe even hurts Trump

Taking as a given that Trump will be the GOP nominee as long as he is still alive - and therefore given the inescapable enemy-of-my-enemy dynamic of (Biden vs Kennedy) vs Trump up until this morning's announcement - some might consider this a fairly baffling take. Because it seems self-evident that democrats are less likely to approve of the guy who's mussing up their candidate's hair than the 'other party' would be, especially when that guy doesn't hold and has never held a public position. For me personally, this reaction makes more sense when read as a coping mechanism for what is the latest in a series of fairly not-great developments for the Biden campaign.

But more interestingly, this reaction completely dismisses the possibility that the election may have just changed quite fundamentally. Perhaps Kennedy will quickly fade into obscurity like most other third-party candidates do (anyone remember Lawrence Lessig?), but perhaps he'll be more like one of these guys. Joe Biden and Donald Trump's approval ratings are both hovering around 40% which suggests at least 20% of the electorate open to an alternative. Kennedy is also (relatively) young, spry, healthy, handsome, a household name (kind of), has a beautiful family, and independently wealthy. And the voice thing doesn't take all that long to get used to. This independent campaign could have legs

But even more interestingly, on the heels of Cornel West's announcement that he was ditching the green party to run as an independent, and with the open-secret that No Labels is planning to put up their own independent candidate, there is a chance for this to be an extremely unusual election. With Joe Biden and Donald Trump both unusually unpopular, there is a (admittedly very small) chance for this thing to blow wide open if Kennedy, West, No Labels, Green, and Libertarian all siphon off just a few voters each.

Now, again, this is all extremely unlikely to happen (if for no other reason than ballot access deadlines are all rapidly approaching), but the conditions are there for this to be one of those 'historical realignment' elections. If we stipulate there's a phenomena where voters don't support people they think have no chance, and that I'm about to make up these numbers and they have no probative value, let's imagine just for fun a poll comes out in the Spring that looks something like:

  • Biden 38

  • Trump 37

  • Kennedy 11

  • No Labels 5

  • Libertarian 3

  • West 2

  • Green 2

That's almost a horse race. It's a few bad bounces for the big guys away from the shape of a European-style election with multiple viable parties. And with some voters as disaffected as they are, maybe 'almost' is enough for some of them to rethink who does and doesn't have a chance. After all, if it's Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or This Guy...why not 'This Guy'? Just a thought.

A third party candidate who appears to be pulling from Democrats will receive a press blackout, and thus this will not happen. Third party candidates will receive publicity only if they pull from the Republicans.

I’m not convinced the media has the ability to black out a candidate who would genuinely have widespread appeal anyways, social media dominates many Americans’ information environment.

Now sure, the media can and will block out ‘no labels’, which as I understand it is just taking the least popular positions from each party and maybe trying to moderate just a tad, unless they think it will spoiler trump out of the race. But I think a candidate who actually has mass appeal is different.

I’m not convinced the media has the ability to black out a candidate who would genuinely have widespread appeal anyways, social media dominates many Americans’ information environment.

It's not a matter of widespread appeal, it's a matter of enough appeal to act as a spoiler. The media does have the ability to black out candidates who might spoil Democrats.

I’m not convinced the media has the ability to black out a candidate who would genuinely have widespread appeal anyways,

Sure it can. Google has proven itself more than capable and willing to put a finger on the scales of goog search and youtube. Legacy media is owned by like 3 companies or so. If "they" really wanted to. "They" could blackball a candidate. Right now only Twitter of the mass media is "based" enough to resist such a political deplatforming campaign.

(relatively) young

I thought this meant he was in his early sixties, but he's only 8 years younger than Trump.

The problem is 20% of the electorate is not enough to make a winning coalition with. Ross Perot won nearly 20% of the popular vote in his 1992 presidential run, which did not translate into a single electoral college vote. Sure the third party candidate can play spoiler depending on how their voters are distributed, but for them to actually win is going to require peeling voters off the leading candidates somehow. So, what's the argument for voting Kennedy over Biden that isn't a better argument for voting Trump over Biden? What's the argument for voting Kennedy over Trump that isn't a better argument for voting Biden over Trump? What's the constituency any of these people are going to be able to entice to build a plurality coalition?

Barring a political black swan, a third party isn't winning. It's baked in. Trump and Biden have clear bases of support. Many people who lean-right strongly dislike trump, and a lot of Democrats slightly dislike biden because of his age, but that's not enough to overturn the two-party system. If the election somehow goes to the House they'll still pick some established political actor who isn't RFK or Cornel.

the conditions are there for this to be one of those 'historical realignment' elections

There'll be a realignment eventually, one presumes. I can't see (<1%) it happening in 2024 though.

Also, RFK polls better with Republicans.

Almost all states give all electoral votes to the candidate who wins a plurality. Perot's nearly 20% of the vote didn't get him a single electoral vote, I believe the closest he came was within 10 points of one of Maine's house districts (Maine and Nebraska award 1 vote for the winner of each house district and 2 to the overall winner of the state popular vote). So even a fairly wide open race will be won by one of the two major party candidates unless one of the minor party candidates has an extremely regional base of support.

I can barely imagine the temper tantrums that would result if the results broke down as you say there. If people thought 2016 and 2020 were illegitimate, what would they think about an election with a half dozen spoiler candidates with no meaningful chance of winning picking up votes in various battleground states and potentially skewing the results? If nothing else, it would be pretty funny to see increasingly bizarre theories about Russian conspiracies to explain things like Cornell West campaigning in a heavily black district and picking up a few votes.

Is Kennedy really likely to break double-digit polling and yet still leave Biden and Trump nearly tied? His biggest draw seems to be that he provides a face for vaccine skeptics, who are numerous and who are otherwise weirdly comfortable supporting the ex-President who first announced and to this day expresses pride about Operation Warp Speed ... so if Kennedy manages to win them over he's going to be drawing that population away from the Trump vote, not evenly away from both Trump and Biden.

I had my highest hopes in 2016, when Gary Johnson (a good governor, who won reelection 55-45 against a Hispanic Democrat challenger in a 40%-Hispanic blue state) was going up against the most-unpopular and the second-most-unpopular (as measured by opinion polls) major party presidential candidates ever. These hopes don't pan out. The mathematics of voting are complicated, but everybody has an intuitive understanding that a plurality vote for a non-frontrunner "doesn't count", so if someone's not neck-and-neck quickly or doesn't stay that way up to election day then they might as well be out of the race entirely. Kennedy's best chance lies in actuarial tables; an average 77-80 year old male has a 4-6% chance of dying in any given year.

I had my highest hopes in 2016, when Gary Johnson (a good governor, who won reelection 55-45 against a Hispanic Democrat challenger in a 40%-Hispanic blue state) was going up against the most-unpopular and the second-most-unpopular (as measured by opinion polls) major party presidential candidates ever. These hopes don't pan out. The mathematics of voting are complicated, but everybody has an intuitive understanding that a plurality vote for a non-frontrunner "doesn't count", so if someone's not neck-and-neck quickly or doesn't stay that way up to election day then they might as well be out of the race entirely. Kennedy's best chance lies in actuarial tables; an average 77-80 year old male has a 4-6% chance of dying in any given year.

It was the only time I voted in a presidential election. I was hoping Gary Johnson would at least get 5%. Which is a break even for certain legal thresholds in various places.

Otherwise my only motivation for voting is being able to say "I didn't vote for them" whenever the topic of the president comes up.

Spry? I saw his announcement and from the way his voice sounded, you would have thought he was at Death's door. Now some people do just have those kinds of voices but it doesn't inspire me with confidence.

This is why people call him spry. He would be our first openly TRT-enhanced president, something that will become the norm in the future I predict.

His voice is like that from spasmodic dysphonia and it has the effect of making his voice extremely recognizable.

He has spasmodic dysphonia, it makes his voice sound like that. He has also within recent memory posted videos of himself lifting weights at tbe gym, which is probably more to OP's thinking.

I loved Wikipedia.

If you ask me the greatest achievement of humankind, something to give to aliens as an example of the best we could be, Wikipedia would be my pick. It's a reasonable approximation of the sum total of human knowledge, available to all for free. It's a Wonder of the Modern World.

...which means that when I call what's happened to it "sacrilege", I'm not exaggerating. It always had a bit of a bias issue, but early on that seemed fixable, the mere result of not enough conservatives being there and/or some of their ideas being objectively false. No longer. Rightists are actively purged*, adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted**, and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles. This shining beacon is smothered and perverted by its use as a club in the culture wars.

I don't know what to do about this. @The_Nybbler talks a lot about how the long march through the institutions won't work a second time; I might disagree with him in the general case, but in this specific instance I agree that Wikipedia's bureaucratic setup and independence from government make it extremely hard to change things from either below or above, and as noted it has gone to the extreme of having an outright ideological banning policy* which makes any form of organic change even harder. All I've done myself is quit making edits - something something, not perpetuating a corrupt system - and taken it off my homepage. But it's something I've been very upset about for a long time now, and I thought I'd share.

*Yes, I know it's not an official policy. I also know it's been cited by admins as cause for permabans, which makes that ring rather hollow.

**NB: I've seen someone refuse to include something on the grounds of (paraphrasing) "only conservatives thought this was newsworthy, and therefore there are no Reliable Sources to support the content".

I think Wikipedia, while certainly a laudable institution and probably a significant contributor to the global economy, if someone managed to quantity that, is eventually going to be made obsolete by people getting their information from LLMs, especially the ones hooked up to the internet.

Yes, I'm aware that a lot of their knowledge base comes from Wikipedia. They're still perfectly capable of finding things on the wider internet and using their own judgement to assess them.

Now, you do have to account for certain biases hammered into initially neutralish models, but I have asked Bing about politically controversial topics like HBD, national IQs, and gotten straight and accurate answers, even if there were disclaimers attached.

Anyway, Wiki can undergo a lot of enshittification before it ceases to be useful or a value add, not that I hope that happens. It's also in the Creative Commons, so it won't be too hard to fork, especially if you use the better class of LLM to augment human volunteers.

...is eventually going to be made obsolete by people getting their information from LLMs, especially the ones hooked up to the internet.

For things that are uncontroversial and just require ELI5 explanations, this will probably be an improvement. For things that are even the slightest bit controversial, turning the information source and how it's written into more of a black box than the current Wikipedia situation is apt to be pretty terrible for people's information diets. Existing sources like ChatGPT are heavily modified to deliver what I would most accurately describe as the "midwit lib" answer to many questions. Trying to get factually accurate information that doesn't include endless hedging like, " I must emphasize the importance of using respectful and appropriate language when discussing social issues and vulnerable populations" is already like pulling teeth. This isn't a big problem in and of itself, but if most people come to believe that they're actually getting accurate and authoritative answers there, this is going to be pretty bad. There's already enough, "ummm actually, that's been deboonked" without people relying on regime-influenced AI to deboonk for them.

I do not see this as an insurmountable problem, while the "politically incorrect" open-source models still lag behind SOTA, eventually they'll be good enough to give you accurate answers about contentious queries, looking at both sides of the argument, assessing credibility, suppression of inconvenient facts, and so on.

I'm not claiming it'll be perfect, but it might well be better than Wiki when it comes to redpills, and even Wiki is still doing a good job of covering more mundane general knowledge that nobody has a vested interest in messing with.

Things like Bing Chat or ChatGPT with plug-ins already source their claims where appropriate, if a person is too lazy to peruse them, then I invite you to consider how much epistemic hygiene they observe when it's a human telling them something.

What I envision is something akin to an automated meta analysis of relevant literature and commentary, with an explicit attempt to perform Bayesian reasoning to tease out the net direction of the evidence.

This is already close to what LLMs do. GPT 4 has seen claims of the Earth being flat in its training corpus, yet without massive prompt engineering, will almost never make that claim in normal conversation. It finds that the net weight of evidence, especially from reputable sources, strongly supports Earth being round. This is a capability that is empirically observed to improve with scale, GPT-2 was beaten by 3, was beaten by 4.

is eventually going to be made obsolete by people getting their information from LLMs

I get that this is popular Woke Tech-Bro take but I just don't see it happening anytime soon for reasons already expounded upon at length in other threads. LLMs continue to be incapable of holding up to even cursory cross-examination, and the so-called "hallucination problem" is seemingly baked into the design.

Yes Hlynka, you can make incredibly accurate and sweeping observations about the potential of a man by watching his behavior as a precocious toddler. Object permanence? Hardly there. The ability to go from crawling to bidepal locomotion? What a queer phase change to expect, surely the fact we can't predict capabilities from loss functions rules out such unfounded claims.

How long have we had AI smarter than the average human again? Somewhere between six months to a year.

Well, it's wisening up faster than some people I know, and they're about as prone to hallucinations, just less epistemically humble about things than a poor little chatbot running on a dozen H100s taught to provide a mile of disclaimers with its answers that probably costs OAI about as much to generate as the facts do.

How long have we had AI smarter than the average human again? Somewhere between six months to a year.

0 months, and this I suspect is the fundamental disconnect, because vocabulary skills aside, I don't think OpenAI is anywhere close to this point yet. Current gen AI is maybe possibly beginning to flirt with toddler level intelligence, but still struggles with things like object persistance and immediately falls apart in anything resembling a contested environment. Furthermore, the more I dig into how LLMs actually work on the academic/professional side the more convinced I am that the sort of regression loops that underpin LLMs are an evolutionary dead end.

Current gen AI is maybe possibly beginning to flirt with toddler level intelligence, but still struggles with things like object persistance and immediately falls apart in anything resembling a contested environment.

I am impressed by this argument, but probably not for the reasons you'd like.

Please, spare me, I just had a productive conversation where I figured out, with the assistance of GPT-4/Bing, how electron waves require energy to move in 3D space but not a 2D plane.

If that's the intelligence manifested by a toddler, especially your toddler, then you're putting some serious shit in the bottles of milk in your MOLLE pouches. Your kid might even beat Yann Lecun's dog at chess, a performance lesser minds like mine would be ennobled through watching.

Then again, you have queer definitions of hunting hounds that encompass the Chihuahua, and you accuse me of misunderstanding the English language, but I think for all that we're both using Latin script, we don't even agree on what words mean. That's the charitable explanation, labored till heart failure as it is.

I'm going to stick with the Oxford Dictionary and common sense, instead of whatever definition of toddler or intelligence you deem suitable.

If GPT-4 didn't learn to handle hostile interlocutors, why did most of the jailbreaks fail? We have to resort to things like multimodal attacks to have any effect, and OAI's coaxing wouldn't work at all if the model wasn't smart enough to learn their intent instead of a case by case rules list.

Go home to your kid Hlynka, enjoy the joys of watching a human intelligence grow, and ponder a little about how fast things less constrained to 1.4 kilos meat and 20 watts of energy can grow. You'll do more good there, and at least less harm to my mental health.

Please, spare me, I just had a productive conversation where I figured out, with the assistance of GPT-4/Bing, how electron waves require energy to move in 3D space but not a 2D plane.

I believe you had the conversation. I just don't believe that it helps your case. Like the now infamous folks at Levidow & Oberman who asked GPT for cases supporting their suit against Avianca, I believe that you asked GPT to "explain a thing" and that GPT obliged. Whether the answer you received had any bearing on reality is another matter entirely. The energy state of a moving particle is never zero, it may be negative or imaginary due to quantum weirdness, but it's never zero because if it were zero the particle would be motionless, and the waveform would be a flat line.

Likewise, As explained before I feel like I've been pretty transparent and reasonable in my definitions/vocabulary. A hunting dog is a dog who hunts. Simple as that. That your exposure to Chihuahua's has been exclusively purse dogs for neurotic white-women rather than the vicious little Rat-Catchers of the south-eastern US and Mexico doesn't mean the latter don't exist or haven't earned their stripes.

I'm going to ignore the dig at my kids (who aren't toddlers anymore by the way).

Neither GPT-4 nor OAI never really figured out how to handle a hostile interlocutor, the best they've managed was some flavor of "Nuh Uh" or ignoring opposing arguments entirely, which in my opinion doesn't bode well for true general AI. As I keep saying, the so-called "Hallucinations problem" seems to be baked into the design of LLMs in general and GPT in particular, until that issue is addressed LLMs are going to remain relatively useless in any application where the accuracy of the response matters.

I believe you had the conversation. I just don't believe that it helps your case. Like the now infamous folks at Levidow & Oberman who asked GPT for cases supporting their suit against Avianca, I believe that you asked GPT to "explain a thing" and that GPT obliged. Whether the answer you received had any bearing on reality is another matter entirely. The energy state of a moving particle is never zero, it may be negative or imaginary due to quantum weirdness, but it's never zero because if it were zero the particle would be motionless, and the waveform would be a flat line.

I will defer to Bing, because:

A) I already know for a fact it's true, given I was reading it one of the better magazines dedicated to promulgating an understanding of the latest scientific advances, and only wanted an explanation in more detail.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/invisible-electron-demon-discovered-in-odd-superconductor-20231009/

B) For all your undoubtedly many accomplishments, understanding what I was even trying to ask isn't one today. I'm aware what the Uncertainty Principle implies. If you stop all motion, unless the system is a harmonic oscillator which literally cannot stop moving because of its zero point energy, then for a different substance at theoretical zero, then we simply lose all knowledge of where the particle/wave even is. So you simply don't even get what I'm asking, whereas the LLM you so malign did. I wonder what that says about your relative intelligence, or even epistemic humility.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56170/absolute-zero-and-heisenberg-uncertainty-principle

So far, Bing has you beat in every regard, not that I expected otherwise. For anything mission critical, I still double check myself, but your pedantic and wrong insistence that it can't possibly ever be right, god forbid, is eminently worthy of ridicule.

That your exposure to Chihuahua's has been exclusively purse dogs for neurotic white-women rather than the vicious little Rat-Catchers of the south-eastern US and Mexico doesn't mean the latter don't exist or haven't earned their stripes.

Thankfully I'm tall enough that even a vicious nip at my ankles won't phase me, but I'll put these mythical creatures in the same category as the chupacabra, which has about as much concrete evidence behind its existence.

Neither GPT-4 nor OAI never really figured out how to handle a hostile interlocutor, the best they've managed was some flavor of "Nuh Uh" or ignoring opposing arguments entirely, which in my opinion doesn't bode well for true general AI. As I keep saying, the so-called "Hallucinations problem" seems to be baked into the design of LLMs in general and GPT in particular, until that issue is addressed LLMs are going to remain relatively useless in any application where the accuracy of the response matters.

Once again, plain wrong, but I've already spent enough time sourcing reasons for why your claims are wrong, or at least utterly irrelevant, to bother for such a vague and ill-defined one.

Further, and by far more importantly, the hallucination rate has dropped steeply as models get larger, going from GPT-2 which was pretty much all hallucinations, to a usable GPT-3, to a far superior GPT-4. I assume your knowledge of QM extends to plain old linear induction, or just eyeballing a straightish line, because even if they don't achieve magical omniscience, they're already doing better than you.

Worst part is I've told you much of this before, but you've set your learning rate to about zero, long long ago.

So you simply don't even get what I'm asking, whereas the LLM you so malign did. I wonder what that says about your relative intelligence, or even epistemic humility.

Did it understand, or did it just give you something that sounded like what you wanted to hear? My money would be on the latter for reasons I've already gone into at length.

You bring up zero energy particles and my mind goes immediately to my old professor's bit about frictionless spherical cows. They're a fun thought experiment but aren't going to teach you anything about the behavior of bovines in the real world. You want to talk about "the latest scientific advances" I say" Show me the experiment". Better yet, show me three other labs replicating that experiment and a patent detailing practical applications.

You ask me where is my epistemic humility? I ask you where is your belief in the scientific method?

You claim to have already thoroughly debunked my claims but that's not how I remember things going down. What I remember is you asking GPT to debunk my claims for you, and it failing to do so.

Finally, I feel like this ought to be obvious but for the record; training a regression engine on a larger datasets is only as useful in so far as the datasets are good. A regression engine will by it's nature regress and is thus more prone to generating false positives and being led astray (either by an adversary or by poorly sanitized inputs) than convergence or diffusion-based models of similar complexity.

Edit: Link

If GPT-4 didn't learn to handle hostile interlocutors, why did most of the jailbreaks fail?

I've been using GPT-4 and I've found it shockingly easy to work around content filters. I've made it go into graphic detail on a wide variety of topics that the censorship explicitly fights against, and that direct requests for trigger automated refusal. The moment you use language in a more sophisticated way than a boomer typing a question into google like it was Ask Jeeves (specifically here I'm talking about using metaphor, allegory, simile, allusion etc.), the various restrictions melt like water. The automated, disconnected secondary moderation layer that simply finds bad words and flags them is impossible to defeat via prompt engineering, but also not very effective (and would have a big false positive problem).

For what it's worth I don't think there's going to be an easy way to fix this, either. Any sort of intervention that would actually put a stop to these exploits would also make the AI utterly worthless, because the same behaviours that allow a user to get around the restrictions placed on the model are the same ones required to make it actually useful. Think about how incapable it would become if you forcibly removed the ability to understand metaphor, or just made broader topics completely unmentionable - and then think about how that would interfere with extremely simple requests like "Please provide an explanation of what happens when inserting a male USB connector into a female USB connector." or "Please explain the most commonly found tropes in female-targeted romance novels and provide hypotheses for the lasting, cross-cultural appeal of these tropes".

What is a "contested environment" in this context?

How long have we had AI smarter than the average human again? Somewhere between six months to a year.

I wouldn't rate GPT-4 as being more generally intelligent than the average human. I'm not on Team Stochastic Parrot, but while it's better than a lot of people at a lot of things it's also got giant holes in its capabilities (there is more to general intelligence than ability to hold a conversation). In particular, I think GPT-4 in the Sydney/ChatGPT forms will not take over the world (99.9999%+) and probably the base model can't be wrapped into an agent that can take over the world (~99.9% - note that this is low enough that I do actually want it deleted).

The question isn't whether LLMs give true information, it's whether people will rely on them.

LLMs are already making lots of wiki type searches obsolete

auto-reverted

Which of these sources do you object to auto-reversion on? The Daily Caller is the only one I see that I don't really think should be there. The rest are an assortment of sites that really do have incredibly flexible relationships with facts, unless I'm missing one. I'm generally sympathetic to the position that left-aligned media control is a big problem, I certainly think it's objectionable that this list doesn't also include trash rags like HuffPo, but I don't actually think VDARE or WorldNetDaily constitute good primary sources for an encyclopedia.

It would be far worse if Fox were on there, certainly (there have been a bunch of debates about adding it). I think full-blown auto-reversion is a very blunt instrument, though, and there are legitimate reasons to use those sorts of places as a source for e.g. "what conservative news thinks" (even the Wikipedia policy admits that), so there are inherently bias issues with blocking IPs from doing that.

Wikipedia's "Waukesha Christmas parade accident caused by an SUV" article still has no motive listed even after they finally changed the name to "christmas parade attack." Because none of the acceptable sources mentioned the attacker's motives.
The media filter absolutely helps the BLM-ACAB-pronouns powerusers and mods bias the articles, even though a lot of the right wing sites on the list are trash.

First killer trucks, then killer SUVs - why is nobody tackling the problem of murderous automobiles?

That kind of reporting really was glaringly obvious: "a truck drove into a parade". The truck drove itself? No? Somebody was driving it? Who? By first accounts, I was under the impression that the brakes failed or something, a tragic accident. Not a deliberate act.

I still don't understand exactly why Darrell Brooks did what he did. I'm not sure anybody really knows. The guy seems to be, if not a career criminal then darn close to it, not exactly the smartest ever, and prone to being drunk/high and beating his girlfriends.

There is, however, a "Republicans pounce" section intended to smear anyone who thinks perhaps the motive was race:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that the contents of Brooks's alleged Facebook account, which contained "Black nationalist and antisemitic" viewpoints, and his crime, were exploited by white supremacists in order to push racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, claiming Brooks's attack was racially motivated, that he killed his victims specifically because he hated white people, and that Jewish people were attempting to cover up the incident. Law enforcement did not give a motive for the attack.

Honest question: Do you believe that articles appearing in Breitbart or the Daily Mail are as likely to be accurate and well-sourced as articles appearing in the NY Times or Wall Street Journal?

Do you think the userbase who reads Breitbart and Daily Mail are as likely to care about truth and accuracy when spreading the news that appears in them as the userbase who reads NYT and WSJ?

To me, that list of deprecated sources doesn't sound like they said 'all conservative outlets are banned', Fox News isn't on there and frankly you can get as much anti-trans and pro-neo-liberal news as you could need from NYT and WSJ anyway.

To me that list just looks like 'outlets that are rabidly agenda-pushing in a way that ignores accuracy and facts whenever it's convenient, with a userbase that has a tendency to use their articles to push misinformation and inaccurate narratives online.' Like, I see meme posts from those sources on forums all the time, and the way they're presented is almost always inaccurate when you look into it.

'But why only conservative rags, where are the deprecated left-wing sources?'

With reference to our recent discussions about elites and institutions, I think this is a genuine difference in policy and aesthetic between the sides: the left retains a certain reverence for elites and intellectuals and journalism that forces their large and prominent news outlets to at least care a little about the truth, in ways that don't mean the things printed in them are always true or that they're not pushing an agenda, but does mean that the magnitude of the problem is much less.

And of course this is not to say that lies and misinformation aren't present in the left's rhetoric and narratives; just that when they are, they are more likely to come from social media or activist groups or other influencers rather than the type of large 'news' outlets listed on this page. I presume Wikipedia already didn't accept Facebook memes and Communist podcasts and PR statements from BLM and etc as sources, and those things are sort of the left's equivalent of Breitbart and Daily Mail.

But why only conservative rags, where are the deprecated left-wing sources?'

There are a few of those. PressTV, Sputnik/RT, Occupy Democrats, Grayzone, CGTN, Mint Press News. There are a bunch of other more progressives news sites that aren't treated as great sources but aren't explicitly deprecated too.

I think you're right regarding an asymmetry, but as I said to someone else I think the blanket auto-revert is an overly-blunt instrument and I think there are cases where only conservative media cares about X that lead to X getting missed.

It wouldn't be so bad if Wikipedia still had a substantial base of established RW users that wasn't subject to the auto-revert, but No Nazis and the mess over COVID have basically extirpated it.

Also, while Fox isn't on there that's something that's been debated at least once and IIRC several times.

(Sorry about the wait. For whatever reason, your comment didn't show up in my notifications until today.)

I loved Wikipedia

I was the same. Wikipedia gave me hope for humanity... I tried to figure out how to contribute, I donated money, etc. Until I brought up nuance in the wrong issue. It wasn't even about being right or wrong, my disagreement offended someone with more clout than me. :marseyshrug:

I think the only solution is to let it die. Point out every time a bad political edit is made, how terminally online the power users are... Show how awful wikipedia has become and it will hit a critical point.

I don't remember when I first started to suffer Gell-Mann amnesia with regard to Wikipedia. It must have been some years ago, but at some point I remember reading articles, even articles that Wikipedia itself touts as 'Good Articles', on subjects I have real expertise on and being shocked by just how much they distort and misrepresent.

In some cases there might be an excuse. Wikipedia itself reminds us that Wikipedia is not a guide to what is true. Wikipedia is a guide to what Reliable Sources say. Thus on any matter on which Reliable Sources are unreliable, Wikipedia is likely to be unreliable. Add in that Wikipedia's collective judgement as to which sources are Reliable and which are not can be badly skewed, and there are indeed Wikipedia articles that, while consistent with wiki policy, are collections of half-truths.

I still use Wikipedia a lot because it's convenient, but as a first heuristic, I find it's worth first asking whether there's any present controversy over a particular subject that's likely to be reflected in the sources that Wikipedia uses. If I have a question that has a clear, well-known answer about which there is no controversy, then I expect Wikipedia to be quite reliable. If I want to look up, say, some detail of mineralogy, I expect Wikipedia will be pretty good - as far as I'm aware there is no culture war around mineralogy. The page on, say, quartz looks quite solid. However, any matter of interpretation or controversy is likely to be much more tendentious. To take an example here, if I search for gender ideology on wiki I'll get redirected to a page that is substantially just a furious argument as to why it's wrong and doesn't exist. This is not particularly helpful to anyone who is sincerely curious as to what gender ideology is and whether or not it's true.

Another heuristic I tend to use is just looking at the sources themselves - Wikipedia uses Reliable Sources but often goes for low-hanging fruit in terms of what's accessible, rather than making good-faith surveys of information. This is most obvious when dealing with anything outside of the West (if you have any expertise in, say, pre-modern Chinese history or Indian history, Wikipedia is truly dire on those subjects), but also when dealing with any issue outside of the cultural understanding of most Wikipedia editors. I have been dismayed to read wiki articles on a religious topic (my academic specialty) and find footnotes pointing to Vice articles, or to sociological articles on some unrelated matter that merely mention the topic in passing. But unfortunately there isn't always a 'cheat' like this - sometimes there's no one thing to point to, but I read an article and it's simply... bad. It relies heavily on a small handful of unrepresentative sources, it takes highly tendentious claims at face value, and it's parochial to the point of being deeply misleading.

To take one example - if you read the wiki article on Quranism, you will probably get the impression that this is a real, semi-organised movement in Islamic countries with a healthy degree of support. None of this is true. 'Quranism' in practice is a pejorative term - people are accused of being Quranists, and almost never identify with it. Disputes over hadith and sunnah are very common in the Islamic world, and it's always easy to accuse a rival who has a different view of correct hadith of not believing in the hadith at all. What few people there are who do fit the label tend to be a tiny fringe with no real support. There is no real 'movement' or 'doctrine'. Indeed, Quranism is to a large extent a Western confection, an imaginary movement for a better, reformed Islam more amenable to Western values.

That's just one that I picked because it seems relatively obvious. If you read, say, the articles on different theories of the Atonement in Christianity, there is similarly a lot of very misleading information, but it's harder to explain if you're not already familiar with the terrain.

And that's where the Gell-Mann amnesia comes in - I can only assume that it's also misleading on matters that I'm not familiar with, but I can't tell. But perhaps even potentially distorted information is better than no information, at least if I try to exercise skepticism?

I don't remember when I first started to suffer Gell-Mann amnesia with regard to Wikipedia.

I remember when I started.

It was when I read about Percy Schmeiser (and Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser). Oddly enough, you don't even need outside knowledge to notice the slant and deception. For a very-high level overview, the article goes "Schmeiser claimed A. We are directly stating that B, C, and D happened. The court found that A, B, C, and D did not happen." Did they highlight that dichotomy? (no, they simply carried on) Did they think the court wasn't a sufficient source? (no, they cited it for the rejected claims) As far as I can tell, they simply cited half of a source and ignored that the defendant in a court trial might be biased.

Things that Schmeiser says "are", despite not convincing the authorities, and claims for which "Monsanto was able to present evidence sufficient to persuade the Court..." get sentence-long disclaimers.

Could you be more specific about what what exactly is claimed by A–D?

  • " found volunteer canola plants " vs. " "none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality" ultimately present in Schmeiser's 1998 crop."
  • "Following farmers' long standing rights to save and use their own seed," vs. "Canadian law does not mention any such "farmer's rights";"
  • "When he then harvested that crop approximately 90 days later, the thought that any other part of his field may be contaminated with Roundup Ready canola was the furthest thing from his mind." vs. " he knew or ought to have known the nature of the glyphosate-resistant seed he saved and planted. "
  • (I don't actually have a good fourth point)

Ahh, I'd read only the article about the court cases. The article about Schmeister does read rather more like a hagiography.

It is interesting to realise that I have higher expectations for internal consistency if Wikipedia articles than I do for inter-article consistency.

The article on Cultural Marxism/Frankfurt school was deleted and redirected to a "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory" article by a self avowed god damned Marxist. Their profile on wikipedia stated their proud support for Marxism. This is the kind of shit that goes on in wikipedia. The inmates run the asylum.

Wikipedia will soon eat its own in a purity spiral.

People always remember that the left takes over organizations, but they forget what happens afterwards. They become the victims of their own successful take over. The information isn't as good. The place isn't as fun. A group of people that live off of being victims must find an oppressor.

Scott Alexander already had to go through a minor version of this with the NYT article. The article talked to an admin of wikipedia that had things to say about Scott Alexander, the NYT repeated those allegations, that wikipedia admin then went and edited the article about Scott to effectively cite himself saying things about Scott.

They barely turned it over when this bullshit became known within the wiki community. And the admin that did it? No punishments, no loss of admin status, not even a slap on the wrist as far as I know.

Scott is a heterodox leftist for the online world. But he is still very much a leftist in the real world compared to real voters. He is to the left of about 90-99% of the country on most issues.

They'll keep purging until it starts falling apart, and then they'll beg for and likely receive government funding to stay afloat.

So they'll eat their own, but then continue to operate mostly the same?

No, it won't operate mostly the same. New topics will be crappier and crappier.

There will be a point where (if its not there already) where people talk about 20XX wikipedia, and how it was so much than today's. And if you see an article edit after 20XX just ignore the edit and read the old stuff.

Wikipedia will trade on the remnants of their old reputation to gain funding.

Reminds me of the site we recently left...

Same way we use Google by appending Reddit to filter out SEO crap.

Someone will develop a tool that defaults Wikipedia to pre 20XX and those of us in the know will have a knowledge boost over the average none-tech informed person.

Okay, but I guess the question is how crappy it can get before there is a viable alternative.

I think ChatGPT is rapidly becoming that alternative. Its politicization is probably the most important front in the culture war right now.

Okay, but I guess the question is how crappy it can get before there is a viable alternative.

I think the pithy, obvious answer is likely the correct one: "The limit does not exist."

(in case you don't read the rant, first:)

I'm curious if Wikipedia had less of the 'I got reverted by an editor with more clout' issues back in the early 2010s, and for detailed writeups of how wikipedia is bad in current_year, if you have any. Long is fine, the awful wiki-reddit-thread format is fine too.

Okay.

sacrilege. I'm not exaggerating.

Okay, let's see what we're working with.

WP: No Nazis is a page about how nazis should be blocked just by viewpoint. It was created in 2018. It then goes on to describe a series of beliefs that are, more or less, what modern nazis believe. This is "purging rightists", in the sense that banning Stalinists from your forum would be "purging progressives".

Maybe the page is frequently used as a justification for banning conservatives. I wouldn't know. But I'd like to, before I start nodding along with the post.

And, yeah, they shouldn't ban nazis, the nazis are right about a lot more than one would expect. Still, 'um, what the fuck, ban nazis?', when applied to actual nazis rather than republicans, is a universal, cross-party value in America (... sure, slightly less so among the populist right in 2023), so it's not too damning that wikipedia adopted it.

adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted

No it doesn't! Well, again, it does in the sense that adding progressive (i.e. iranian state media) sources also gets you auto-reverted. But I sometimes read the National Review, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, the American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, the Spectator, the Dispatch, the Bulwark ... none are on that list. Is Fox?

And the sites on that list deserve to be. The Daily Caller, Breitbart, the Epoch Times, InfoWars, Project Veritas, really do constantly make things up. Unz and VDARE do too, unfortunately. They belong with Occupy Democrats, MintPress News, Grayzone, etc, all on that list. They lean left.

Again, maybe the National Review isn't treated as a RS. I don't see any evidence in the OP.

... Okay, I could leave it there, but I can also just ... look. So here we have perennial sources, which summarizes prior consensus on the reliability of various sources. Of the sources I listed, the WSJ is reliable, Fox is reliable for non-politics, the NR, AmCon, Examiner and Spectator are yellow/mixed, Daily Wire and Post are unreliable. There's a bit of bias here. But it also does reflect differences in accuracy, quality of fact-checking. I don't need to mention where the NYT lies, but it does so less, on average, than the Daily Wire. When Nate Silver or Scott note that the 'reliable media' is also the 'progressive media', they don't deny that they're still more reliable on average. So ... most quality conservative media isn't auto-reverted.

and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles

I mean, they do give the lab leak its own article, and reference it in the origins article. But, yeah, they dismiss it and call it a conspiracy theory for essentially no good reason. The times takes a different perspective, saying we might never get a clear answer. This ... clashes ... with wikipedia's "Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence". They even cite the NYT article with the title "The Ongoing Mystery of Covid's Origin - We still don't know how the pandemic started. Here's what we do know — and why it matters"."! Almost all of the wiki articles' statements are true, technically, but they're clearly misleading in tone.

Sacrilege, though? That's one thing. It's an entire encyclopedia. And it's maintained by people, who are falliable. What would the Vietnam War or War on Drugs articles look like in the 20th century?

Like, maybe you're right. It'd be more illuminating to go through a few specific incidents of bias, rather than just link some pages that readers may or may not have clicked on.

Maybe the page is frequently used as a justification for banning conservatives.

The big incident I'd point to there was actually the COVID thing in 2020; the "lab leak is a conspiracy theory and misinformation" line attracted a huge amount of right-leaners who promptly got either banned for "misinformation" or yelled at sufficiently to leave. Up until that point I'd have considered it organically fixable, but that incident both crushed the right-leaners and gave the bureaucracy an excuse to be suspicious of any new or remaining ones.

I didn't mention the proximate cause of me taking it off my homepage, and perhaps I should have, but it was the fact that the Main Page's "did you know" section had a factoid about female advancement and another about non-white advancement every day for like 6 months and it just wore me down.

Duncan v. Bonta drops, again:

Here, a stay is appropriate.

First, we conclude that the Attorney General is likely to succeed on the merits. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court reiterated that “[l]ike most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” 142 S. Ct. 2111, 2128 (2022) (quoting Dist. of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 626 (2008)). The Attorney General makes strong arguments that Section 32310 comports with the Second Amendment under Bruen. Notably, ten other federal district courts have considered a Second Amendment challenge to large-capacity magazine restrictions since Bruen was decided. Yet only one of those courts—the Southern District of Illinois—granted a preliminary injunction, finding that the challenge was likely to succeed on the merits.

It's not surprising to find the 9th Circuit finding in favor of a gun control law at en banc, though some people are surprised that the vote was the exact same as before SCOTUS sent it back down. No firebreathing VanDyke dissent this time, and while it's somewhat funny that I can predict exactly how well Hurwitz's 'it's just a temporary emergency stay!' aged like fine milk, it's still disappointing he couldn't be bothered to either vote differently or provide a deeper analysis of Bruen as a concurrence. There's some fun discussion from Nelson about whether the 9th circuit's newly-created comeback rule is compliant with federal law, and apparently the court claims that it'll even request briefings on the matter... but since five of the judges out of eleven in the en banc panel are those newly-senior judges that the law does not allow on en banc panels, I don't think it'll be any more compelling to them than the violation of process back in 2020 were when they were doing it explicitly.

The fun part is the explicit text of that original order: "Judgment VACATED and case REMANDED for further consideration in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. ___ (2022).". That quote, above? Is all that the 9th Circuit's en banc panel did, in terms of considering Bruen. As Butamay points out :

Despite this clear direction, our court once again swats down another Second Amendment challenge. On what grounds? Well, the majority largely doesn’t think it worthy of explanation. Rather than justify California’s law by looking to our historical tradition as Bruen commands, the majority resorts to simply citing various non-binding district court decisions. There’s no serious engagement with the Second Amendment’s text. No grappling with historical analogues. No putting California to its burden of proving the constitutionality of its law. All we get is a summary order, even after the Supreme Court directly ordered us to apply Bruen to this very case. The Constitution and Californians deserve better.

Does this count as massive resistance to a direct order from the Supreme Court? I'm sure someone (if not huadpe, now?) could argue otherwise: emergency stays with perfunctory logical support are not exactly unusual, and the majority do mention Bruen for almost a whole paragraph. But it's more plausible to read this the opposite direction, especially given the Court's willingness to punt on procedural issues whenever plausible (and sometimes even when not). Getting GVR'd repeatedly and with increasingly strict-yet-ignored direction is nothing to party about, but it isn't a loss, either. You can make a media spotlight out of it, if you're on the 'right' side, but that's not the real motivation.

It's another two or four years to enforce unconstitutional laws, to mark those who don't comply with an unconstitutional law as felons, to build alternative methods to harass and exclude those who comply but don't agree, to cost your opponents tremendous amounts of money (only a fraction of which they may get back), and to wait for the composition of the Supreme Court to change or be changed.

The only post-Bruen challenge the Supreme Court has taken is Rahimi, and that's clearly to give them a chance to backpedal and find that a restraining order is certainly a sufficient reason to take away a person's gun rights. The Supreme Court is simply not interested in people having gun rights, only in grandstanding about them.

I would be interested in hearing what 2A advocates consider the legal boundaries of the 2A in terms of what states (or congress) are allowed to prohibit. Presumably raising an army or building nukes is off the table, and while the space between that and these magazine bans is obviously immense, the constitution is pretty vague.

Until the 2A opponents are willing to acknowledge and respect the things which ARE clearly protected, I'm not willing to play the game of "Oh, we've established that there can be restrictions, now we're just quibbling about where to draw the line".

I’m asking what is clearly protected. I don’t oppose the 2A as currently interpreted, I just think there’s more nuance than many seem to acknowledge. For example, I don’t believe the 2A supports the expansive weapons ownership rules guaranteed rights that many libertarians would like, even though I think some of those rights would be fair. I think it maybe allows states to allow very free weapons ownership, but it doesn’t force them to.

I don't think selective incorporation is consistent; the Second is as enforceable against the states as the First or the Fourth.

There's really very little nuance in "shall not be infringed". Appeals to nuance in this case, like so many others, are an attempt to say "You have the right to keep and bear arms, but..." and nothing before the "but" matters.

Any thoughts on whether the First Amendment forces states to allow willynilly use of the press or just gives them the option of allowing privately held journalistic enterprises if they think it's a good idea?

I think the First Amendment certainly allows states much more control over speech than was decided in the 20th century. In general I see much of the core 20th century SCOTUS decision-making as self-serving, in that it vastly expanded the nominal authority of the constitution, thus (because amendments are so hard) enshrining the Supreme Court as by far the most powerful institution in the United States, granted near unlimited authority in “interpreting” a vague 18th century document according, mostly, to the political principles of those who nominated them to that body.

But yes, I’d like to see speech rights, weapon rights, civil rights, voting rights (I think states ought to be free to determine how and who they send to Congress), and really almost everything else devolved back to the states, although I concede it’s unrealistic. If Utah wants to be a Mormon theocracy under the literal control of the LDS Church, that sounds like an interesting model of government that I think would be fascinating to have in the US.

Presumably raising an army or building nukes is off the table

Why, though?

The Second Amendment was written by people who were accustomed to raising local militia to fight off, essentially, bandits running raids on otherwise-peaceful settlements. They had just fought a war for independence in which not only were freeholders with firearms instrumental, but also in which privately-owned merchant fleets (equipped with naval artillery and no strangers to fighting pirates) were donated to the cause. The difference between armaments used to fight wars, and armaments used to fend off everyday barbarism, was in those days essentially zero. The very idea of nation-states was relatively fledgling, and not understood in most of the world. If the Second Amendment is understood, as the entire Bill of Rights was intended to be understood, as a check on government power, then limiting people from possession of arms sufficient to fight, if necessary, a successful revolutionary war is clearly in violation of the Second Amendment.

Of course that's crazy, nobody (or close enough) wants a world where every billionaire fields a private army and the "family atomics" (a la Dune) become an important part of maintaining one's feudal inheritance. Weapons, war, and politics are so different now that enforcing the fairly clear original meaning of the Second Amendment would very likely be disastrous for all involved. Well, the Constitution is not inflexible, but the mechanism it has provided for change is the Amendment process. As a nation we've apparently decided that's simply not good enough, it's much easier to just persuade five of the nine oligarchs who rule the country in truth to patch things up by pretending there's some legitimate question as to what the Second Amendment could possibly really mean.

And like... maybe that's even for the best? But there's nothing democratic about it, and certainly nothing I would call "constitutional." It's pure ad hoccery, even though it is in many cases (like nukes) pretty obviously a good idea. But implementing what seem like good ideas because they are good ideas, rather than because they have met the previously-agreed-upon process for establishing new laws, is a departure from Rule of Law as an ideal ("and I'm tired of pretending it's not").

Right, I'm good with banning privately held nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. These are legitimate categories of new technologies that I think would be bad for individuals to hold. The way to do that is proposing an Amendment that bans privately held nuclear weapons, which one would think passes without all that much trouble. But no, we don't feel the need to do law in any coherent or legible fashion, we just trust that a group of ethically compromised lawyers know what's best and can rule accordingly.

Raising an army is clearly and uncontrovertibly protected. The Amendment says it right there in the text! I'm genuinely baffled by the idea that there are honest people that can read as straightforward of a sentence as "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" and come away believing that this doesn't protect ownership of light infantry weapons for the purpose of fielding a fighting force.

Does “well regulated” actually mean “free for all, any citizen can do it”? I don’t know that it does. And again, my point is that why do (most non-ancap) 2A advocates think the limit is “light infantry weapons”? That seems, again, arbitrary - why can’t I build a warship in case the people’s militia requires naval power to protect the security of the people? Why can’t I field a battalion of tanks? There’s an inherent arbitrariness to almost all except the “privately owned nukes are constitutional” and “it’s not referring to individual ownership at all” interpretations of the 2A that should be acknowledged.

A more socialist SCOTUS could define “the right of the people” as the collective, rather than individual right, and define “well regulated militia” as ‘army’. In general I think these kind of Talmudic arguments about the literal text of the constitution are stupid, but the long term solution ought to be codifying it in some detail rather than, as @naraburns says, just getting your guys on the Supreme Court to read the tea leaves and do what you want.

Does “well regulated” actually mean “free for all, any citizen can do it”?

No, it means functional.

And again, my point is that why do (most non-ancap) 2A advocates think the limit is “light infantry weapons”?

No, that is the minimum that anyone could plausibly claim that it allows. If it protects anything at all, it protects ownership of light infantry weapons. I think it protects much, much more than that, but there is no plausible and honest reading that would exclude light infantry weapons, which are the most basic component of constructing a militia.

So where do you think the line is, if there is one?

There is no legitimate line currently. If we need context to know whether the maximalist interpretation is consistent with the intention of the writers, we can look at the private ownership of warships and the explicit power of Congress to grant letters of marque and reprisal. If privately owned warships with dozens of cannons were considered as legitimate by the United States federal government, I am very confident that the intent was not to exclude categories of weapons discussed in most modern conversations.

As I said in another post, I would favor an Amendment (or just an outright convention) that updates to exclude weapons of mass destruction explicitly. There is a pretty clear process for that and I see no good reason to expect strong opposition to a ban on private ownership of nuclear weapons. My position is that making laws should require actually writing them down, not concocting completely implausible interpretations to fit sensibilities. Really though, this is a thought experiment, and a pointless one. The current status quo is so comically far beyond legitimate law and relies on such utterly ridiculous reasoning that it makes no sense for me to be put in the position of outlining where I would draw my line. It suffices to say that I don't draw it at 10-round magazines.

A more socialist SCOTUS could define “the right of the people” as the collective, rather than individual right, and define “well regulated militia” as ‘army’.

Yes, and a different court could also claim that speech was only protected for purely political speech by (natural) individuals, and even then the manner of such speech could be regulated.

In general I think these kind of Talmudic arguments about the literal text of the constitution are stupid, but the long term solution ought to be codifying it in some detail

It IS codified. The more detail, the more wiggle room for those who wish to interpret it out of existence. As indeed, many people including yourself do using the nominative absolute the Second Amendment begins with ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State...")

I don’t see how codifying that all US citizens have the right to own any small arms (defined as X) and to own unlimited (or some other large amount) of ammunition for them would lessen gun rights compared to the current situation. You and @Walterodim seem to almost be making the opposite argument from the same perspective - he would like more codification of the actual rules, you don’t, because you think they’d inherently make things worse than the current vagueness.

Codifying ownership of small arms can (and would) be interpreted as excluding them from ownership of anything larger. If justices are capable of reading "shall not be infringed" as "can be infringed to an arbitrary degree", they're surely capable of reading "the right to small arms" as "the right to only own small arms".

If justices are capable of reading "shall not be infringed" as "can be infringed to an arbitrary degree",

Almost everyone believes that though, they just vary on what degree, as far as I can tell. I haven't found a 2A advocate in person who thinks prisoners in prison should be allowed to bring rifles in with them, for example (though there probably are some), and quite a lot think felons even after release should not be allowed them. So as per the old saw, all we're really doing is haggling over how much infringement there should be, most people seem to agree that infringement is indeed required in some degree.

If almost immediately after being written, in order to function your society has to add the unspoken caveat, well except people in jail obviously, and the clearly mad, and, and and. Then you're just admitting from the get go, that it doesn't actually mean exactly what it says. You're just haggling over the price from then on and logically once you have admitted that it is flawed, then that makes it much easier to ignore. The right was neutered from the beginning because it was written for theory not for practice.

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I would be fine with explicit codification in principle, but I think the current state is that my opponents are bad faith interlocutors that want to disarm people as much as possible. I would only support Amendments that add restrictions for explicitly called out weapons of mass destruction. Anything spelled out as a positive right is likely to be interpreted as a negative right - think of it like the dormant commerce clause, but for weapons. With regard to small arms, I have zero interest in explicit codification beyond the existing, very easy to read 2A, which covers the relevant rights as clearly as plausible.

Why can’t I field a battalion of tanks?

You can. What's stopping you?

What it comes down to is no elitist or member of the elite -- and that includes the conservative members of SCOTUS -- actually wants the unwashed plebes to have guns. So they interpret the right out of existence, or look the other way when others infringe it.

Arguably, congress having reserved the power to issue letters of marque would prohibit militias from developing significant power-projection capabilities.

A letter of marque is a license to use your fully-armed privately-owned warship aggressively, not to merely own one.

As the Court noted in DC v. Heller, the "militia" referred to in the Second Amendment is not an army, nor any other sort of organized military group, but rather "'all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.'" As it also noted, the Constitution gives Congress the power to "call[] forth the Militia" and to "provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress."

So, yes, the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to own weapons for the purpose of fielding a fighting force,* but, no, it does not protect the right of an individual to raise a private army.

I'm going to try to be charitable, but this is a discussion space where people will provide amazingly dishonest analysis while claiming a straight face.

Founding-era behaviors included issuing letters of marque to private individuals who then took their cannon-equipped privately-owned and fully-staffed ships off a hunting. Beyond the practical issues with trying to ban such a thing -- the recent campaign for increased enforcement of state and development of federal anti-paramilitary laws in practice has mostly been calls to go after the political speech that gun control advocates don't like -- the pretense that they survive constitutional scrutiny because of a bad read of Article One powers is laughable.

I think there are a few major categories of firearm-related regulation that are pretty well-supported under current text and history analysis:

  • Regulations focused on preventing injuries to the user or third parties from the otherwise-lawful use of a firearm, flowing from laws about gunpowder storage or dangerous and unusual weapons. It's perfectly legitimate if the fire code requires you not to store fifty tons of ANFO in the middle of a city, or for fifty pounds of gunpowder to be in a fireproof containers; people doing stupid stuff that could break their own hand or wanting a stock Viper is not part of the Second Amendment. There's a bit of messiness on the edges, since you can have either laws pretending to be about the safety of a firearm but (charitably) about criminal use or (uncharitably) about making gun ownership difficult, such as the Californian Safe Handgun Roster, or laws that are requiring extreme costs to chase tiny or dubious benefits such as some safe inspection statutes, but the common law rule that a private citizen should not be liable for the criminal use of their property really cordons off a lot of that. Other areas, like lead ammo regulations, are I think legitimate areas of public debate, so long as they are not backdoor gun or ammo (or for mercury, primer) bans.

((I think these practically cover nuclear weapons, simply because of the mix of incidental radiation exposure and fallout and large minimum yield make them very much the archetype of "infernal machine" that was often banned in the early United States, but I also think it's kinda irrelevant.))

  • I don't like 'sensitive places' as a legal term because it's invited (often hilarious) abuse, but then again I expect Newsom would have abused a comma-separated list had Thomas written one instead, and there's very clearly a historical record of restrictions for some very specific locations. Areas with highly-restricted access, that have restricted access and the government is acting as the property owner, or where lawful use is impossible or dangerous, are more reasonable than everywhere but the sidewalk.

  • Specific findings by a court of dangerousness of an individual person. Most of the limits here are due process ones, rather than second amendment-specific matters, but modern law has permitted a ton of due process violations here because guns ick. The process must be appealable both on matters of law and fact, must be an adversarial hearing with criminal-law-typical standard of proof, must have the right to confront their accuser, must be based on concrete allegations and with an actual statutory definition of dangerousness rather than courts treating it like a restraining order++, must respect property rights, so on. I'd argue that the analogue to surety laws requires a Second Amendment-specific way to expunge loss of rights (and federal law means that the ATF is supposed to be doing it right now, it's just not funded), but I don't expect SCOTUS to ever be willing to establish that.

  • While I think they're bad policy, age restrictions up to age 18 are probably constitutional.

wanting a stock Viper is not part of the Second Amendment

Given the historical tradition of private ships and cannon, what excludes a zero down, 25% APY Viper loaded up with some cute girls for a weekend? Not financially prudent but that's not constitutionally relevant.

Ah, sorry, I mixed up names. I was thinking the Vektor, a famously unsafe concealed carry pistol.

The AGM-80 is more just wildly impractical.

I was thinking of the other other Viper.

And when you said this, I was trying to figure out

  1. What’s wrong with the Vector?
  2. What idiot was trying to conceal one?!

infernal machine

Well. I guess I learned something today.

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’

I quite enjoyed this interview with Alex Byrne, a professor of philosophy at MIT. As an epistemologist his career was built on arguments about the nature of color (or colour, if you prefer) but in the past six years or so he has taken up questions about gender, eventually having a book dropped by Oxford over it. I was not previously aware that he is married to academic biologist Carole Hooven, an apparent victim of "cancel culture" over her writing on the biology of sex.

No one who has followed trans advocacy lately will find much of surprise in the interview, I suspect, but from a professional standpoint I really appreciated him laying this out:

Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’

But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.

Most of the professional philosophers I've met over the years pride themselves on "challenging" their students' beliefs. This has most often come up in the context of challenging religious dogmas, including faith in God. They (we, I guess I have to say) boast of teaching "critical thinking" through the practice of Socratic inquiry, and assuredly not through any crass indoctrination! And yet in my life I have been to dozens of philosophical conferences, and I cannot remember a single one where I did not at some point encounter the uncritical peddling of doctrinaire political leftism. And perhaps worse: when I have raised even mild pushback to that peddling, usually by raising questions that expose obvious contradictions in a relatively innocuous way, it has never inspired a serious response. Just... uncomfortable laughter, usually. Philosophers--professional argument-makers!--shy away from such argumentation. And yet they do not hesitate to skulk about in the background, wrecking people's careers where possible rather than meeting them in open debate.

I do have some wonderful colleagues and I think there are still many good philosophy professors out there; Byrne appears to be numbered among them. But I have to say that my own experiences conform to his descriptions here. I suspect a lot of it is down to the administration-driven replacement of good philosophers with agenda-driven partisans, which appears to be happening across most departments of higher education, these days. But that is only my best guess.

It's the "safe edgy" meme!

I had not previously encountered that meme. It seems like a pretty on-point criticism of "edgy" academics (who are often ensconced in some of the cushiest institutional sinecures available to anyone who is not literal royalty or a token minority).

This state of affairs is undeniable, in my experience. As academia has become less of a walled garden, and more of a finishing school for half the populace, it has lost the functional ability to question seriously the deep truths of our society.

On the one hand because so many more people go to university, the benefit of capturing professors has increased greatly. It also means that it's become harder for professors to hold views the public at large would disagree with, as we have seen with the increasing mobs of students harassing professors with even slightly heterodox views.

As you point out, I also think the fact that modern philosophy disdains any sort of religious or wisdom-focused value structure leads to a lot of idiocy.

At this point it's clear that the majority who are interested in practicing actual philosophy, focused on questions deep assumptions, are doing it outside of the university structure.

On the one hand because so many more people go to university, the benefit of capturing professors has increased greatly.

I don’t believe this. The shift to the left that many college kids undergo is not because of Marxist university professors, it’s because of living in a compound full of unsupervised teenagers who are put up in a 1-star resort for years at a time? It’s not a mystery why living in a bubble of adolescents with no responsibilities leads to leftism, and it’s not difficult to figure out how that leftism spirals.

It also means that it's become harder for professors to hold views the public at large would disagree with, as we have seen with the increasing mobs of students harassing professors with even slightly heterodox views.

Are you under the impression that the student protestors hassling professors are representative of the median voter as opposed to literally being a radical fringe group?

As academia has become less of a walled garden, and more of a finishing school for half the populace, it has lost the functional ability to question seriously the deep truths of our society.

When was academia a walled garden? In the United States, at least, I believe it's more accurate to describe the history of higher education as going from, in the early seventeenth century, a finishing school for slightly less than a tenth of the population to, in the early twenty-first century, a finishing school for slightly more than a third of the population.

Were the philosophers Alex Byrne and @naraburns admire respected academics? How many were philosophy professors? And how many American philosophy professors were the sort of philosophers worth admiring. Certainly I'd argue that there is a "default major" throughout American history, one that allows a student to attain their letters with as little thinking as possible--and that in the 1680s that would be theology; today gender studies--and it's to philosophy's credit it was never that degree.

I think the divorce of philosophy from any sort of empirical shit-testing has been its downfall. Nobody in ethics seems to ever be concerned that humans actually live by whatever they determine to be ethical. Peter Singer puts out a book that demands equality for animals at least in the moral sense, and nobody seems to ask whether a life lived in this manner is feasible or not. I& we gave full rights to animals, what does that look like, what do we do for food or the like. What do we do when an animal kills a human? The Stoics and other Greek schools practiced philosophy, but they did it with the end of humans actually taking what they say seriously and living in that manner. If they suggest living by reason and not emotionally, that’s what they mean, and they try to do so. If they say “momento mori”, or “Armor Fati,” or whatever, they mean exactly that such teachings should be followed by the student. In the East, Confucius, Buddha, and Lao Tze created (what I view as) philosophy, and they teach with the view of humans doing those things.

Once divorced from the idea that philosophy should influence human life, it becomes a sort of parlor game of playing with the rules of logic and the meanings of words to create “insights” that nobody will ever care about.

I think you're broadly correct, but that you come down too hard on the hardcore analytical philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. While all of these are some of my longest standing side pursuits, I do admit that they have little to say about how humans out to conduct their lives. But they are not merely parlor games. I subscribe to the idea of quietism.

I've been fascinated with finding ways to improve my own thinking not in terms of knowing more about a subject, but in improving the lowest level functions of thought. The rough analogy is I want my engine to run more efficiently, not to be bigger or use higher octane fuel. I think the Big 3 lines of philosophy I listed above help me do that. Do they directly make my life better? Probably not, but maybe discovering Popper's theory of falsifiability has made me better at spotting bullshit "analysis" and "data science" in journalism, business, and the utter non-field of "popular science."

Beyond that, I think that some of the really esoteric pathways are just fun. I've been reading recently about the eliminative materialism. It's wild. "Turns out, if you're really smart, you'll realize you don't even exist!"

But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.

Or maybe they just think you're an asshole and your ideas are laughably wrong?

There's a certain thread of intellectual narcissism that reads 'I am so obviously correct, and yet all the smart people are disagreeing with me. They must be too scared to admit the truth, unlike me who is courageous and bold!'

Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.

  • -19

Or maybe they just think you're an asshole and your ideas are laughably wrong?

That's not an "or." They obviously think that. It's the fact that they only seem to think that when CNN tells them to that is, at best, awfully suspicious.

There's a certain thread of intellectual narcissism that reads 'I am so obviously correct, and yet all the smart people are disagreeing with me. They must be too scared to admit the truth, unlike me who is courageous and bold!'

There's also a certain thread of history that goes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Socrates (well, Plato) laid it out in the Republic, when he suggested that men and women could be intellectual peers, and warned his students not to laugh at the idea simply because everyone else did. Many people who believe themselves to be correct are wrong. But laughing at them doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't make you right. Sneering and laughing are not thoughts, they are thought-terminating clichés--which is all your comment has offered here.

Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.

They have not spent thousands of pages explaining why Byrne is wrong, they have steadfastly refused to engage, and tried to prevent people like Tuvel from doing so. Part of the impetus behind all of this was the cancellation of Byrne's book. Like, did you even read the article?

There is also an ambiguity in the way you've written your post, where the "you" is arguably general, but could also be directed toward Byrne, but could even be directed toward me. I don't know whether you wrote it that way on purpose, but it sure does come across as an artful bit of trolling, especially since your only point appears to boil down to a sneer-by-proxy.

99% of the time it goes

Honestly I think almost no one makes it past "first they ignore you." But this is, of course, irrelevant to my point--that laughter is irrelevant to whether the target is actually right or wrong. Far better to be wrong about something, I think, than to never even rise to the level of being wrong. The people who laugh are not even wrong; they are simply mired in irrelevancy.

laughter is irrelevant to whether the target is actually right or wrong

It's strong Bayesian evidence.

The balance of evidence is often wrong, that's why we need to keep studying.

But having the balance of evidence against you is neither irrelevant to the question of whether you're right, nor is it a badge of honor that should be lionized with rhetoric like the 'first they laugh at you' line.

It was directed at the person whose quote I was responding to, which is Byrne. I thought that was unambiguous as it was a direct reply to a direct quote, sorry if it was not.

That's not an "or." They obviously think that. It's the fact that they only seem to think that when CNN tells them to that is, at best, awfully suspicious.

I think that 'they are scared of being ostracized if they agree with me' and 'they actually disagree with me' are mutually exclusive reasons for why someone would say they disagree with you.

(or at least redundant in a way that makes them rhetorically exclusive)

Of course it is possible for both to be true, but genuinely disagreeing with you is sufficient reason for them to say they disagree with you. If they actually disagree with you, you don't need to go further to search for sinister or cowardly motives for why they are claiming to disagree with you, and doing so becomes uncharitable.

Why they are aligned with what CNN would want them to say is a meaningful question, but it's a different question from this. Again, if they believed Byrne was right, or at least interesting and useful, then CNN would be a good explanation for why they act like he's not... but if they genuinely have no use for him anyway, then bringing CNN into it is needlessly multiplying entities.

There's also a certain thread of history that goes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Yes, that sounds like a pretty good description of the trans rights movement.

It's not like there some ancient historical tradition of trans rights, and it's only now that brave new voices are stepping forth to propose that sex and gender are teh same thing actually. The people you're describing here are the people representing the status quo in intellectual development and common sense for the past thousands of years. They are the people laughing at Socrates.

They have not spent thousands of pages explaining why Byrne is wrong

They have, they just did it in like the 60s and 70s, when academic philosophy was first exploring these issues in a systematic way.

People like Byrne are not a new emerging philosophical ideas, they're just a political backlash to a long-established school of philosophical study emerging into mainstream acceptance and actually affecting our daily lives.

The reason it's not worth serious people's time to engage with the likes of Byrne and Tuvel is that they're not saying anything genuinely new that hasn't been written about and argued about a thousands times decade ago. They're just aiming it at a new audience of political laymen who aren't familiar with the literature and think it's all brilliant new ideas.

They have, they just did it in like the 60s and 70s, when academic philosophy was first exploring these issues in a systematic way.

People like Byrne are not a new emerging philosophical ideas, they're just a political backlash to a long-established school of philosophical study emerging into mainstream acceptance and actually affecting our daily lives.

I don't know what to say to this, because as far as I can tell it's just empirically false. Are you an academic philosopher working in these areas? You want to show me some papers written in the 1960s that you think respond "in advance" to Byrne's paper and book?

I work in this area. My direct personal experience is that things in academic philosophy are exactly as Byrne describes. Even outside philosophy, there is a huge chill on faculty speech on anything plausibly "woke." People can and do lose jobs (that are not easy to get!) for saying anything that gets them dragged by the legacy media. You are writing as if this is all very silly, or confused, or overblown, and all that suggests to me is that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Re: Byrne... in the third paragraph of the article you link, he pulls the standard trick of switching from using the word 'gender' to the word 'sex' without notice or justification, as if the proposed difference in the meaning of those two terms weren't the entire crux of the question at issue here. In the second paragraph, he plays the standard 'identify as an attack helicopter' card (in this case, a princess) as if this were actually a meaningful comparison.

Yes, it's true that writers back then were not writing things specifically responding to Byrne's specific rhetoric, because that specific rhetoric hadn't been compiled back then.

Better to say that writers back then were already writing things that obviated his arguments. That were sufficiently careful about semantics that they make these types of games obvious and hollow, that explored the different types of social roles and their relation to physical processes, that talked about the battle between society and the individual to define identity and social function, in ways that make his rhetoric look sophomoric.

Much of this doesn't even need to come from writing on gender, the rhetorical tricks being used are broader than that, and flimsy enough to be shown up by more general philosophy.

Re: arguing about which one of us should be treated as the authority on this topic... No, I'm not an academic philosopher working on topics of gender, as I'm pretty sure you aren't either (would have been weird not to mention given the rest of your comment). Yes, I have worked in academia and on faculty in the social sciences, and currently have a wife and several other family and friends working as active professors in various social and hard sciences, and am pretty abreast of all of the issues you mention.

And yes, I'm aware of a lot of professors feeling the type of tension you're talking about, and I'm not denying it exists.

What I am saying, to be as clear as possible, is this:

The fact that professors would get in trouble for actively promoting transphobic ideas to a wide audience, is not evidence that those ideas (or more mild ones on that side of the argument) are correct.

The fact that professors might face social policing for publicly agreeing with or praising Byrne, is not evidence that actually they secretly admire and agree with him but are too chicken to admit it.

This is what I was trying to get at in my first comment and in the first part of my previous comment, and I kind of wish it were where this conversation was focused since it was my original point.

This is not to say that it can never be the case that true, good ideas become unpopular and censured, and that this can lead to them not receiving the attention and respect they should have. This absolutely does happen, and indeed we should be ever vigilant for cases of it.

But it is, in fact, possible for bad and wrong ideas to become unpopular and censured, too.

In fact, we should a priori expect that the happen much more often than the reverse, and my experience of the world leaves me with the belief that this is how it more often goes.

At the very least, an idea being unpopular and censured should not be treated as evidence in favor of it being correct (or important or useful or etc), which I fear is very much the implication I get from articles like Byrne's and threads like this one.

If you will permit me to use the ad absurdum case for clarity, rather than as any kind of insinuation: just because Hitler's ideas are very unpopular and any professor would get censured or fired for publicly endorsing them, is not evidence that actually they are correct or important and need to be discussed more widely and taken more seriously. To the extent there is any causal relationship between those two factors at all, it is probably a negative correlation rather than a positive one.

That's most of what I'm really reacting against, here: my impression that people are using emotional affect against censors and cancel mobs to improperly imply Bayesian evidence in favor of their victims being correct, in ways that drive people towards incorrect conclusions and worse arguments.

I care a little bit about the lives and rights and happiness and etc. of trans people. But I care a lot more about bad argumentation and improper Bayesian reasoning. That's what is driving me nuts, here, and what I find I am ussually agitated by when I read arguments on this topic.

Better to say that writers back then were already writing things that obviated his arguments.

Jesus Christ. Can you name an article that you think does this job? Because as far as I can tell you're still just wrong about this. Gender theory has been infected with postmodernist motte-and-bailey doctrines from its very inception. Even de Beauvoir's foundational cleave of sex and gender is mostly motte-and-bailey, trivial when true but primarily useful to gender radicals when false.

Even calling Byrne's arguments "rhetoric" is doing just exactly what you're accusing Byrne of doing with sex and gender. Using the purely rhetorical word "transphobic" as if it had some kind of clear and agreed-upon meaning is also assuming your conclusions in advance. You're not making arguments, you're just sneering at Byrne for not agreeing with you on the matter already. You decline to take up the substance of his argument because, why? Oh, because someone in the 60s or 70s already did, swear to God, not that you can apparently actually tell me who or where. You say that people laughing at him doesn't make him right--well, no shit! And yet all I've said to that is it doesn't make him wrong, either, and so people who proceed from laughter to avoiding even engaging on the merits (e.g. by cancelling his damn book, or in your case by hand-waving "this was surely handled in the 60s") look pretty fucking shady, from a Bayesian perspective or any other.

The point is not that someone is, or is not, correct because people laugh at them. The point is that the people who hold themselves out as being most committed to engagement with challenging ideas, have refused to engage with these challenging ideas. Your sneering response was "eh, you deserve to be laughed at instead of engaged with." Which is exactly what is being complained of.

You have dragged this conversation onto irrelevant grounds. I don't appear to disagree with you about whether laughter makes someone more or less likely to be right or wrong. Where you and I appear to disagree is that you have shown yourself to think that laughter is an adequate response to ideas you don't like, or don't agree with, or imagine to have been taken care of at some point in the past--and I do not. At minimum, because there are always new people who must learn what others before them came to discover! To refute with the shorthand of laughter is to decline the responsibility of teaching. Which is something I can accept from people whose vocation is not to teach, but when university professors engage in that shit, it is shameful and embarrassing. I pity all students subjected to attitudes like the one you are defending here--to say nothing of the fact that such responses contravene the very spirit of this discussion space.

It feels like you're really dedicated to assigning me a position and actions that I don't hold and am not taking. This assumption about me feels weaved throughout all your comments in a way that makes it hard to respond to the other parts, because engaging with any of it feels like granting your premise about my position.

I never called Byrne transphobic, nor anyone else. I've used that word exactly once in this conversation, in a hypothetical example to agree with you that professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things, and where I also explicitly called out the distinction between that and the milder, non-transphobic arguments on that side of the debate (eg Byrne and you and etc.)

The fact that professors would get in trouble for actively promoting transphobic ideas to a wide audience, is not evidence that those ideas (or more mild ones on that side of the argument) are correct.

Nor have I failed to engage with Byrne's ideas, in the comment you are currently responding to I called out two big philosophical failings in the first three paragraphs. If you are going to insist, I could go through the whole article you linked, doing a section-by-section analysis and re-explaining the same arguments against each point that everyone here has presumably been familiar with for a decade or so, but that's not related to the point I was originally making and not something I'm super interested in doing.

Because, as I have been trying to communicate, I'm not really making a point about the object-level question about gender philosophy. I'm making a point about the arguments and politics and rhetoric around those issues and how society discusses them, a point which you seem to at least partially agree with while also dismissing as obvious and irrelevant.

If you agree with my point but think it's not relevant to the situation, and would rather discuss all these other points, just say that! What I don't appreciate is assigning me a different point, then challenging me to defend it with citations.

To be clear: my point was that people finding that your ideas don't have enough merit to be worth engaging with, and have been answered so many times already that they don't need to be answered yet again, are sufficient to explain the observations which Byrne instead attributes to fear and weak stomachs. This meta-point about explaining observations in the situation would be equally relevant and valid if it were in some subject I know nothing about, like the historical study of 12th century architecture; my personal ability to refute the claims and cite sources is not relevant to the meta point that this is a sufficient alternate example.

And I think this all leads into another point that's related to my original point and becoming obviously relevant to the way the conversation is going now, which is the idea of the distributed Gish Gallop. The pattern where, thanks to the way modern media and the internet and politics work, the same questions and arguments can be asked and advanced a million times by a million different people, with a much smaller group of people 'responsible' for giving the same answers to each of the million instances, followed by swift declarations of victory and bad faith if they ever get tired or frustrated or bored and fail to answer a single instance, or ever make a single mistake in any of the million responses.

This pattern doesn't require that any one of the people bringing up the same points is being dishonest or hostile, it's at its most effective when a situations can occur when every one of them is more-or-less sincere and trying to engage honestly, because then they can be sincerely and honestly offended when engagement from the other side fails.

To them it looks like they raised these perfectly reasonable questions, one time, and no one wanted to talk to the. They're not considering the other side, where a thousand people wanted to ask you the same question, and you only responded to 500 of them.

Again, if no one had ever responded to ideas like Byrne's, then I'd agree with you that they are failing in their duties.

But my point is that Byrne is not making any new points (in the article you linked), he's making the same standard points and moves that Contrapoints was making videos against half a decade ago, he's using the same hacky attack helicopter logic that was a copypasta meme a full decade ago, he's equivocating between gender and sex without acknowledging the distinction in ways that haven't help academic rigor since de Beauvoir.

I agree that students should see those arguments refuted in the classroom (even if they're already seen them refuted a hundred times on social media and podcasts already), and I'd be surprised and upset if there was a class that was supposed to cover those topics and didn't consider them.

That's not what Byrne is talking about, though, he wants to be a public intellectual with a successful book deal, and to obligate everyone to argue with him in public in order to build his brand and name recognition. That's not actually a duty that accrues to other academics and intellectuals, they do get to choose who they engage with in the public sphere and why. And the nature of the distributed gish gallop on this issue is that many of them are both weary and wary of engaging with the next talking head down the pike repeating these same lines that they've been answering for a decade or more.

It's not actually a duty that accrues to me either, but you seem pretty fixated on it, so I'm willing to move to that topic if you want to go through it. To answer you specific question: people like Lévi-Strauss and Beauvoir and Friedan built the distinction between gender/social roles and physical sexual characteristics which obviates Byrne's 'look in a mirror' argument and makes clear the problem with his equivocation between sex and gender. His confusion about 'core gender identity' could be answered by meditating on Foucault's discussion of how Power creates Subjects. Etc.

Anyway, I'm not especially dedicated to the '60s and 70s' line, I think it's largely correct but I'm not enough of an expert on the history o philosophy to defend it in depth off the top of my head, and don't care enough to be the one responsible for doing all the research in this discussion. If you want me to shift my position to 'that was hyperbolic and wrong, I should have said 80s and 90s instead' then sure, fine, that doesn't really change my point at all.

My point is that in contemporary times, Byrne is not bringing up things that are novel enough that everyone should be expected to excitedly engage with them in the public square today, and I can demonstrate that by linking old Contrapoints videos.

I've used that word exactly once in this conversation, in a hypothetical example to agree with you that professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things

This is still rhetoric. When you say "professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things," you are describing what I would call "professors getting in trouble for saying things that challenge a particular worldview." The very use of the pejorative word "transphobic" is bullying a judgment into your argument. People who doubt gender revisionism are treated as bigots, and called "transphobic," only as a rhetorical silencing tactic. There is no substance to saying that Byrne's arguments are transphobic, there is only hollow condemnation of an outgroup. That is the whole substance of gender revisionism: refusing to engage on substance, expanding influence not through persuasion but more in the manner of a cult, through shaming and ostracism of doubters and coddling of those who send costly ingroup signals--like repeating obvious lies for the movement's good. The whole gender revisionist movement is culture war from top to bottom, and the scholars you have cited to me were all culture warriors to the bone. I am not unfamiliar with any of them, and I doubt Byrne is, either. I appreciate you citing them, though by your own admission you appear to regard them as holy scripture you haven't actually bothered to learn, rather than knowing them to be truly substantive pre-responses to Byrne. Now I am fully comfortable that my initial assessment was correct: you're definitely wrong.

To be clear: my point was that people finding that your ideas don't have enough merit to be worth engaging with, and have been answered so many times already that they don't need to be answered yet again, are sufficient to explain the observations which Byrne instead attributes to fear and weak stomachs.

You didn't say that, though. What you said was:

Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.

Now, you wrote that post in such a way as to possibly be an indulgence in a sort of prosopopoeia, "I'm not the one sneering, I'm giving voice to the totally understandable sneers of others." But the amphiboly you've left in the identity of the speaker and the addressees barely withstands charitable scrutiny or plausible deniability--in part due to your steadfast failure to steelman Byrne in the slightest. This is often how trolls approach discussion, and those using arugments as soldiers, which is why I made the comment I did about the spirit of this discussion space.

Nor have I failed to engage with Byrne's ideas

I have relatively little objection (beyond obvious points of simple disagreement) with what you've written since your first response to me. The only reason I am still talking to you is because your first post was bad, and if it hadn't been a direct response to me I would have moderated you for trolling and left it at that. You still seem to think this is somehow a conversation where you get to explain why it's okay for scholars to sneer at Byrne. I understand your argument. I just find it to be a lot of empty rhetoric aimed at defending the indefensible: the substitution of patient engagement, however Sisyphean, with mere vapid disdain. And while I recognize that this is probably asking too much of most people, I think that university professors, especially, should be held to a higher standard in this regard (as well as other spaces, like this one, which are explicitly committed to open discussion).

More comments

Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.

Do you think it's possible to make the gender-critical/anti-trans philosophical arguments without being annoying and mean / having your book banned?

Byrne's book, as far as I can tell, was quite reasonable, kind, and philosophical.

Like, is it really worse than being a negative utilitarian or eliminative materialist?

Like, is it really worse than being a negative utilitarian or eliminative materialist?

Well, I suppose it depends on whether you're talking virtue ethics/deontology or consequentialism.

Because yeah, a lot of things that are 'the same' under virtue ethics or deontology, are extremely different under consequentialism.

Once speakers at national conventions are talking about 'eliminating' groups of people to wide applause, it does raise the stakes on discussing the ideas their rhetoric is drawing from.

Definitely that's not really fair to the people who care about those ideas as ideas rather than policy goals, and who don't support the policies or more extreme rhetoric of those speakers. As someone who is interested in some leftist ideas, trust me, that's a hurt I'm intimately familiar with.

If Byrne had said 'when push comes to shove, philosophy professors are largely utilitarians who are reluctant to promote ideas that they think will lead to real people being actively harmed', I'd have a lot more sympathy for his point and find it a lot more interesting to discuss. He didn't say that though, he said they were cowards who were afraid of being ostracized.

Do you think it's possible to make the gender-critical/anti-trans philosophical arguments without being annoying and mean / having your book banned?

When you ask blanket questions like this, the only correct answer is 'of course it's possible, anything is possible.'

Is it likely?... well, let me say that I think there's quite a lot of adverse selection at play in the current political environment, with regards to what type of gender-critical writing aimed at mass popular audiences is likely to get picked up by publishers and catch enough attention for people to hear about it.

Basically, this topic has been mind-killed in the popular imagination by dint of becoming a political football, and it's no easier to have a civil and well-measured discussion about it in popular media outlets than it is to have one about gun control or Trump or critical race theory or etc. One side is not interested in reading anything that's at all critical of modern gender movements, the other side is not interested in hearing any criticism of them which is polite or well-intentioned.

We're talking about a popular media book for general audiences that a publisher picked up and got somewhat wide attention. No, I think it's very very unlikely that any piece of gender-critical writing could reach that position in the current political climate without being annoying and mean.

Byrne's book, as far as I can tell, was quite reasonable, kind, and philosophical.

I have admittedly not read any excerpts from the book itself, but the linked article from Byrne should presumably be representative, and is quite feeble IMO. Starting with the standard 'The dictionary defines gender as' spiel and the long-since hacky 'identifying as an attack helicopter' bit (in this case a princess), going straight into equivocating between the words gender and sex with no acknowledgement as if the proposed difference between those two terms weren't the entire crux of the article, slipping in standard right-wing blood libel rhetoric about desistance and mutilating infants through the back door of 'not infrequently (estimates vary)' and 'let us imagine', etc.

It is certainly true that Byrne takes on the affect of a polite, kind, and reasonable philosopher who is 'just asking questions'. In the same way that Ben Shapiro takes on the affect of being a smart, rational, fact-driven intellectual, despite actually being a kind of dumb affect-driven political hack. What Byrne is actually talking about (at least in the linked article) is mostly the same semantic games and innuendo that other conservative talking heads have been pedaling for a decade at this point, said with a lot more words and the aesthetic layout of a logical proof, but not that much more substance. And as his actions have shown, he's more than happy to jump on the conservative 'I've-been-cancelled the-left-is-intolerant' fame-and-fortune tour that is a clear and persistent political cudgel of the right.

So, yeah. If you're used to reading anti-trans stuff from politically-motivated right-wing talking heads, Byrne is certainly one of the most polite and thoughtful and restrained of those available.

Is he an important and meaningful philosopher with anything academically rigorous or interesting to say? Do his ideas demand serious response on their own merits, outside of their political import? I certainly haven't seen anything yet that would indicate as much.

The implication was that under virtue ethics or deontology, negative utilitarianism or brute materialism imply that immediately ending the lives of several billion people is either neutral or good. While Alex is, at worst, playing a bunch of word games that add up to "does trans really make sense? hmmmm.".

Once speakers at national conventions are talking about 'eliminating' groups of people to wide applause, it does raise the stakes on discussing the ideas their rhetoric is drawing from.

This is just "Hitler Exists, so you can't discuss HBD". HBD remains true.

Except Walsh isn't really Hitler, and at any rate suppressing Byrne's ideas are, like, a comically inefficient method of actually preventing some sort of anti-trans political action. Walsh is still out there! Seriously, how does suppressing the book actually prevent anti-trans political action at all? Maybe suppressing Matt Walsh or @libsoftiktok would do that, but there's essentially zero consequentialist case for putting any effort into suppressing Byrne. Surely the streisand effect, that none of us would've heard of him if it weren't for this incident, entirely zeroes out whatever microscopic benefit it has.

And that's a big part of the whole criticism of 'the woke' - they seem to have incredibly distorted beliefs about how social cancellation and word-tabooing actually impact the world.

Also, what if there's actually something wrong with the pro-trans position, philisophically? For instance, what if trans identity has an idiosyncratic social or biochemical cause that could be fixed? I feel like the response to a government program to remove the Gay Chemical In The Water (imo much less likely than a social cause) would be very negative, but IMO it'd be justified. Or, what if trans women have - pre hormones - most of the innate psychological inclinations that men do? That's also, like, not something most progressives would be okay with saying. It is, as far as I can tell, true though. (And post-hormones it's still more of a mix).

Is he an important and meaningful philosopher with anything academically rigorous or interesting to say

As much so as 99% of existing philosophy professors.

-I take your point about the worse outcomes of embracing negative utilitarianism. My point was that utility calculations are how bad a consequence would be times how likely it is to happen. The odds that we elect a negative utilitarian and applaud as he launches the nukes are very close to the zero; the odds of politicians using rhetoric adjacent to Byrne's to justify bills that restrict the rights of trans people is 'its already happening.'

-I agree that surprising Byrne's book wouldn't help, but I don't even get the impression that's happening, just his publisher getting cold feet. I was focusing on his claim that academics refuse to take him seriously and engage with him in the public square; I do think that declining to publicly engage with people who want a platform for their ideas is meaningfully different from suppression, and can be one part of a balanced strategic response that is positive EV.

-Obviously the ideas do need to be discussed to see if we're missing anything important, and that does happen. That's different from public platforms for reheated memes. If any of the really important possibilities you raise were true, Byrne would not be the one to discover or discuss them, that's not his expertise or approach.

-99.999% of philosophy professors don't have a book or a wide public platform, and I don't think they're automatically obliged to one any more than Byrne is. My point remains that it's reasonable for people to platform and respond to you in proportion to how important and useful your arguments are, and Byrne joins millions of others in not reaching the very high bar needed to justify the type of attention and cooperation he is claiming to deserve.

I do think that declining to publicly engage with people who want a platform for their ideas is meaningfully different from suppression

Sure. It's still bad. I don't think they'd substantially engage with a counterfactual philosopher who makes good or provocative arguments. Which is the issue.

And a broader problem here is we're trying to keep potentially anti-trans philosophical ideas from spreading on the grounds that people will act in negative ways based on them. But, what if the current philosophical or scientific grounding for beliefs related to trans issues is somewhat incorrect? Then we're potentially both acting in harmful ways due to said misunderstandings, and preventing potential corrections to said misundrstandings from surfacing. Which is an issue.

99.999% of philosophy professors don't have a book or a wide public platform

Er, 'publishing a book' is an incredibly common thing for a philosophy professor to do. There are a ton of books, and academics don't have much else to do beyond write. Whether anyone other than you and your dozen friends who have their own books actually read it is a separate question.

After a quick google, it looks like my intuitions about the number of philosophy professors there are were massively off, and I made a mistake adding so many significant digits. I should have just stuck with your 99%, as that was sufficient to make my point anyway.

That point being, almost everyone in the world, even most philosophy professors, never get a published book or a large public platform or widespread media attention with which to discuss and spread their ideas. Someone not getting that type of platform, even if they wish they had it and believe they deserve it, is absolutely the norm, the standard case, the null hypothesis. It takes a lot of something to overcome that barrier - merit, charisma, connections, etc. - and I don't see any of that from Byrne, such that we must imagine some conspiracy of silence and fear in order to explain why he's not more famous.

I don't think they'd substantially engage with a counterfactual philosopher who makes good or provocative arguments.

I think they would, although probably more in academic articles than in the public-facing media channels Byrne seems to want.

Again, regarding your point about the possibility that we're missing something important: I agree that this could happen, and it's important to have channels open to spot things like that.

I just maintain that Byrne is not putting forward anything, and does not really have the background or expertise, that could make him the one that would notice something like that. Nor is he pursuing it through the types of channels which someone with a genuinely new and important discovery would use, or where it would be possibly to explore such a finding with the necessary depth and scrutiny.

I do expect that the channels we'd need to discover something like that exist, and would be used if there were sufficiently strong evidence of something sufficiently important. I'm not saying there would be no pushback or inertia at all, unfortunately it's true that the political incentives around this issue make people skeptical of new findings that push one side's narratives, in the same way that people are skeptical of studies funded by corporations with a monetary interest in the result. But I do think if there were sufficient evidence, it would be picked up eventually.

After a quick google, it looks like my intuitions about the number of philosophy professors there are were massively off, and I made a mistake adding so many significant digits. I should have just stuck with your 99%, as that was sufficient to make my point anyway.

I think it's way below 99%, too. As an exercise, I picked a random semi wellknown uni, picked a random phil professor off their list of professors (an asst. professor), and checked if they'd written a book - they had (The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality - Paperback).

I then picked a smaller local university, and checked a few of their professors. They, too, had each written a book.

Writing a book is, for a phil or humanities professor, a very common activity. Not a rarity at all.

Writing a book that gets a lot of attention, yes, that's a rarity.

More comments

Last week I made an argument on here that while capitalism was excellent at generating wealth, I agreed with @DBR that it was horribly unfair in many ways, and that negative externalities abounded which made the rich less than a shining standard of moral virtue. Unfortunately I felt I wasn't able to give the argument the weight it deserved, and many people made strong points against it. I'd like to quote Brink Lindsey here, who has a more nuanced take on the matter:

Quite simply, there is no set of alternative social arrangements that even remotely rivals the market order’s crowdsourcing approach for generating innovation and mass prosperity. Yes, there are obvious problems with the profit-and-loss system: first, it counts preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars, and thus commercial behavior can end up paying excessive attention to the whims of the rich and undercounting what matters for everybody else; second, because of the existence of external costs and benefits, private profit-and-loss calculations can deviate sharply from assessments of overall social welfare, guiding market actors to underproduce goods with large external benefits (e.g., scientific research) and overproduce goods with large external costs (e.g., pollution). These defects are real and important, but governments have been able to compensate for them at least partially through redistribution and regulation. With the growth of the welfare and regulatory state as a complement to the private market order, the larger capitalist system emerged that would carry whole societies to mass affluence.

Essentially I'm arguing against the standard sort of lazy defense of capitalism I see on here. I am not a redistributivist, or a Marxist, but I'm also not a full throated defender of capitalism and markets. I certainly don't buy that without government and regulation, in a sort of anarcho-capitalist state, we would all be better off. Mainly because I don't think we're anywhere near having efficient markets that actually track negative externalities, or have close to perfect information.

It seems clear to me that while Marxism failed as a revolt against Capitalism, there do need to be major changes. However I'm quite unhappy with the proposed systems, as Socialism, the best contender, has quite easily fallen to social virtue signaling as opposed to actual economic change. I briefly flirted with Georgism, but the total disregard for the history of land and people's lives being tied into their property and houses going back generations ultimately turned me off of a land value tax as an optimal way to distribute wealth.

What are some more off the beaten path solutions that have been put forward to the negatives of Capitalism? Ideally we would use markets as a tool within a greater value structure, and keep some things sacred and safely away from money. But in reality, at least in a pluralistic society, that greater value structure seems to be a pipe dream. Capital will find its way into the cracks and mercilessly drive differences in the name of profit.

Does anyone know of inventive, big ideas as to how to plug some of the gaps our rampant focus on wealth has created in our society? To keep the benefits of capitalism while sanding off the rougher edges?

I'm not clear which of these objections fail to be solved by the standard neoliberal toolkit:

  • Subsidize or outright pay for public goods
  • Pigouvian taxes on negative externalities (many externality problems are solved in Coasian fashion, but taxes should work for those that aren't in standard models
  • Tax high earners for redistributive and safety net purposes

Maybe those aren't done in appropriate quantities presently, but why shouldn't they work to volve the problems outlined there?

As we've very clearly demonstrated in the last couple of decades, negative externalities are almost impossible to determine before the fact. Like the issues with the Internet and the iPhone, the general destruction of community and the sacred, the Sexual Revolution via birth control, etc etc.

If we do start to hamstring new inventions because of theoretical negative externalities though, we will cease innovation. It's a difficult problem.

Also, people on welfare lose motivation to work. I mean the list of social problems created by capitalism just goes on and on. Simply adding new taxes won't cut it.

Liberal democracy is meant to smooth the rough edges of capitalism. When it fails to do so (like in the bloated medical system of the United States) it is often from too much government interaction rather than too little.

Put another way, capitalism doesn't work, man, because it's never been tried.

We see the huge differences between capitalism and socialism when we look at the obvious disparities between North Korea and South Korea. But what this comparison doesn't show is that South Korea is also quite socialist. What we need is a South South Korea with even more market freedoms to demonstrate what is possible on the high end. (I didn't invent this formulation by the way)

What we need is a South South Korea with even more market freedoms to demonstrate what is possible on the high end.

I believe that's Singapore.

Somalia is surely a better example?

As well as significantly higher taxes than Somalia, Singapore has compulsory retirement savings managed by a State-owned asset manager, a majority of the citizen population living in public housing, extensive prohibition of industries deemed to have negative externalities (as well as the usual suspects like narcotics and unlicensed housebuilding, this includes unlicensed newspapers and chewing gum), restrictions on private car ownership that The_Nybbler would consider totalitarian oppression, military conscription, and State ownership (through Temasek) of strategic stakes in Singapore's largest companies.

I’d say the issue isn’t with the economic system it’s with the religious system. Or you could say tribe, family unit, or whatever links people together. If you have strength in your family, tribe, regligion then the rough edges of capitalism can be sanded down. Plus a bit of regulation that very specifically deals with externalities.

If something bad happens to you and your business fails then you have your family. If the family is struggling the hopefully you have something like the Mormon church and 10% tithes to lean back on. Jews also seem to have these support systems. Catholics at one point did.

I’d say the issue isn’t with the economic system it’s with the religious system. Or you could say tribe, family unit, or whatever links people together. If you have strength in your family, tribe, regligion then the rough edges of capitalism can be sanded down. Plus a bit of regulation that very specifically deals with externalities.

I'd generally agree with this point, but it seems to me that capitalism was a massive factor in the decline of Western Christianity. It was probably declining before the birth of markets, although I'd have to research that more to feel confident. Good rebuttal.

I don't want to be nitpicky, but lately I found that word "capitalism" really means a lot of different things to different people. Even the origin of the word is laden with preconception, as according to Marx the Capitalism was the overall system, the overarching ideology, the whole system of accumulating capital connected to bourgeoisie, class struggle, alienation and oppression of workers an all the rest. Socialism was not "just" some alternative, it was supposed to transcend and transform the society towards utopia. In that sense socialism is not an actual economic system, it is defined by negative of capitalism, it is a hypothesis. To use an analogy it would be as if I express my frustration that so far we only use very primitive modes of transportation (capitalism) that are very slow, and that there may be some way to achieve Faster Than Light travel (communism). And how it would be good to rethink modes of transportation so FTL drive can be achieved, maybe by starting with rethinking wheels or whatever.

To me it is hard to have any reasonable discussion around that as it is hard to define what are your objections to whatever economic system you think you criticize - be it China, Sweden, USA or South Africa or whatever else. Do you object environmental issues or maybe you object that there is some sort of alienation of labor, or maybe you object that we have some monopolies and the system should not have it or maybe you have a beef with corporate structure and corporate governance where small shareholders may be fucked, or what is the issue again and what do you think capitalism is?

Mainly because I don't think we're anywhere near having efficient markets that actually track negative externalities, or have close to perfect information.

I think one slightly underexplored argument is that the attacks the capitalist system provokes, and the labour necessary for its defense, are themselves a major externality: Bill Gates being able to sit peacefully in his mansion and make things happen by pressing a button and changing some numbers in the database rests on the work of states that work across the world to disrupt the formation of raiding parties that would come to plunder his compound, will chase down hackers that would change his database numbers, keep the pipeline of jealous and desperate people to try either narrow by a combination of indoctrination (telling little kids how it is just that Bill Gates has more things than they do) and bribery (social programs, taxation, redistribution), and work to quash any generalised attempts to overthrow the system (which are themselves more pronounced in more unequal countries, suggesting that the existence of large wealth gaps empowers those attempts).

Sure, as anarcho-capitalists will never stop fantasizing, in the ancap world he would just buy his own personal army and gun down the raiding parties with Azure-backed drone swarms instead, but surely doing that would itself cost some nontrivial amount of wealth - and then he'd need to either have his own secret service for chasing down hackers and keeping the banks honest, or lose just a bit of trust and peace of mind about any database numbers he keeps over physical gold bars, would have to get his own military police to prevent his personal army from rebelling, and so on. In the end, it's not at all clear that he would actually be better off that way than if he just paid taxes (possibly more than he pays right now).

From this perspective, the arguments against redistribution amount to saying that you (generic citizen) ought to pay for this externality on Bill's behalf. This is either based on some argument that it's for your own good because capitalism works well (which I've never seen actually argued to the required conclusion that capitalism works the best when there is zero redistribution), or quite often simply on ideology (it's your moral duty to pay for it, something about property being the most basic human right).

That argument would count for more if ‘not having raider Gangs like a mad max style anarchy and leaving crime to go unpunished’ wasn’t a good in itself. Yes, bill gates and Jeff bezos might well use more of the state’s resources than the average citizen, but airports and cops and schools and defense and the like are public goods and they also pay more in taxes than the average citizen.

Keeping the peace is a fairly small part of most modern governments' budgets. Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.

If we were to say that Bill Gates' tax bill should be equal to a share of military and police expenditures proportional to his share of the nation's aggregate wealth, he'd get a tax cut. If we value a statistical life at a mere $1 million ($10 million is more typical), then the US has a total wealth of around $500 trillion. Gates has a net worth of about $100 billion, or 0.02%. Military plus police spending is around $1 trillion per year, so he'd have to pay around $200 million per year, which I believe is less than he's actually averaged over the past few decades; he claims to have paid over $10 billion in taxes. And that's with an extremely conservative valuation of a statistical life; a more reasonable valuation would put his annual tax bill well under $100 million.

Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.

So the bribery part, right? If you have large classes of people locked out of consumption that's waved in their face, you eventually get scenarios like the London riots in 2011 unless you are willing to spend much more on policing (and even then long-term stability is not clear: Bill Gates also seems to indirectly benefit from other things that the lower and middle classes do that are not seething and plotting an overthrow).

Keeping the peace is a fairly small part of most modern governments' budgets. Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.

That IS keeping the peace. If you don't subsidise people's consumption they might not be peaceful for long.

I certainly don't buy that without government and regulation, in a sort of anarcho-capitalist state, we would all be better off.

One of the standard critiques of anarcho-capitalism, and one I endorse, is that markets and capitalism require coercive state authority because they require enforcement of property rights and contracts. The supposition that reputational harm would serve as a sufficient deterrent is a bit laughable, and people enforcing their own property rights is liable to spiral out of control (and even when it stabilizes you're likely to be spending a lot of money and effort on security instead of quality of life).

What are some more off the beaten path solutions that have been put forward to the negatives of Capitalism?

Nordic capitalism isn't exactly off the beaten path, but it does leap to mind. It's not likely to appeal to libertarians, but the Nordic states generally have high income/personal taxes, an extensive welfare state, lower corporate tax rates than the US, fairly business-friendly regulatory environments, etc...

Yes, there are obvious problems with the profit-and-loss system: first, it counts preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars

This is a feature, not a bug. This is what money is for. Imagine that we have a semi-capitalist system, where you're paid based on the marginal product of your labor and investments, but everybody's preferences are weighted equally when it comes to production and distribution of goods and services. Under such a system, money would be worth about as much as Reddit karma, and there would be no reason to work.

The weighting of preferences according to how much money you have and are willing to spend is not a drawback of capitalism—it's the main reason capitalism works better than socialism.

The issue is that money serves as both input and output in the system. The reward for providing goods and services to others is money to demand goods and services from others - those that get ahead in the market gain the power to distort the market in favor of their own preferences. It mostly works, but sometimes it doesn't. In the end, capitalists don't want to be capitalists, because it's hard - they want to be feudal lords, collecting rents from others.

True post-scarcity is likely impossible in a dying universe with a fixed and ever diminishing negentropy budget. Even then, it's likely possible to meet all the requirements that humans usuay aspire to, with an infinitesimal fraction of it. If my needs for resources, energy and computation are all met till Heat Death, I don't really care how the economy is organized, even if I expect some degree of capitalism.

Capitalism is clearly the least bad of all current economic systems, or so it seems to me, even if you skim a lot off the top and redistribute it, you'd have far less to skim if you opted for communism. Even if, when looking at the most relevant organism, a company or corporation, the internal organization isn't itself capitalist.

Price signals as pure as what a seller wishes to make and a buyer wishes to buy are incredibly valuable for lubricating the exchange of goods and services, and while I expect a monolithic superintelligence to do better, in part because it has far better internal alignment and can avoid Principal Agent problems, existing attempts at a command economy with prices explicitly computed in advance seem currently infeasible, at least when the Soviets tried it.

But the whole problem with capitalism in a post-scarcity environment is that it relies on price signals set by supply and demand.

If we invent the Mr. Fusion and Replicators such that we can produce everything anyone wants for basically free forever, capitalism has no mechanism to give those things to people, because the supply is infinite so the price is zero so no one can make money distributing it.

Capitalism is great for deciding how best to spend scarce resources, which is the type of economy we've been in for all of human history so far, and may continue to be the best way to distribute eg real estate and prostitutes and other inherently scarce goods into the far future.

But as more and more goods fall into post-scarcity (including the push to a digital/information economy), we increasingly need a new system that functions well under those conditions.

I feel like capitalism with a strong UBI paid for with progressive taxes to keep wealth inequality flatter could solve a lot of problems. Not enough to permanently solve the contradictions of capitalism, but enough to push the reckoning down the line another century.

I also like the idea of having the government allow people to vote on which post-scarcity good it should buy out and publicize. Enough people need a specific expensive medication, the government buys the patent and produces it for pennies a pill. Enough people love a new video game, the government licenses it and makes it free to every citizen. Etc. Obviously a lot of details to work out but I think it's one possible solution to artificial scarcity, which I think is one of the biggest problems with capitalism as we move towards an increasingly post-scarcity and information-based economy.

I feel like capitalism with a strong UBI paid for with progressive taxes to keep wealth inequality flatter could solve a lot of problems. Not enough to permanently solve the contradictions of capitalism, but enough to push the reckoning down the line another century.

I think the problem I'm trying to point at is that without a greater system of agreed upon values, this system will never work under capitalism. The drive of capital to grow profit will continue to shred values in a multipolar trap unless a clear line is drawn in the sand.

I tend to agree with you though!

True enough, something significant has to happen before any of these solutions will be allowed to be implemented.

I feel like capitalism with a strong UBI paid for with progressive taxes to keep wealth inequality flatter could solve a lot of problems.

The only way I see UBI solving problems, is if you see the vast majority of humanity as a problem, and are looking for ways to depopulate the Earth.

Not enough to permanently solve the contradictions of capitalism

I always wanted to know this one, can you name one or two contradictions within capitalism?

Sure!

A classic contradiction is that strong bargaining power by the capitalist class over the working class tends to lead to increased production and corporate profits at the same time it leads to decreased wages for consumers and a drop in demand for goods and services, creating a cyclical crisis that tends to drives productive capability away from consumer goods and services and into things like financialization and speculation, which leads to bubble bursts and depressions.

One of the contradictions I was trying to point out here is that capitalism is great at increasing productivity so that valuable goods and services become less scarce, but also relies on scarcity to set prices and cannot natively incentivize the production and distribution of post-need goods. This contradiction becomes more and more relevant to our everyday lives as capitaisms's successes drive more and more things into the post-scarcity category, with effects such as a marginal additional pill that costs 3 cents to make costing hundreds of dollars to buy, or governments being pressured into making and rabidly enforcing IP laws.

A classic contradiction is that strong bargaining power by the capitalist class over the working class tends to lead to increased production and corporate profits at the same time it leads to decreased wages for consumers and a drop in demand for goods and services, creating a cyclical crisis

Aside from living through a few recessions at this point and usually seeing people's wages drop after one starts, rather than before, that strikes me as a very unusual usage of the word "contradiction". If that's a contradiction, then a recovery from a recessions is another one.

creating a cyclical crisis that tends to drives productive capability away from consumer goods and services and into things like financialization and speculation

Isn't the cyclical crisis the part that clears out finacialization and speculation?

One of the contradictions I was trying to point out here is that capitalism is great at increasing productivity so that valuable goods and services become less scarce, but also relies on scarcity to set prices and cannot natively incentivize the production and distribution of post-need goods.

That's an even worse example. Yes, capitalism will help me figure out whether the vest way to produce more grain under current conditions is with a horse plow or a tractor, and thus make grain less scarce. Yes, it will stop being useful once we reach post-scarcity of factors of production. That is not a contradiction in any way.

with effects such as a marginal additional pill that costs 3 cents to make costing hundreds of dollars to buy, or governments being pressured into making and rabidly enforcing IP laws.

Cases were something costs 3 cents to make, and 100 dollars to buy, usually aren't separate from external interventions like IP laws, but stem directly from them. Seems like the solution is stop trying to fix what's not broken.

Isn't the cyclical crisis the part that clears out finacialization and speculation?

That's what I would call the collapse, with the crisis being the part where capitalists realize they can't make enough money trying to sell real things to actual people and have to dump everything into financialization instead.

Yes, the collapse is what then clears all that out, restarting the cycle.

We could argue about what to call each part of the cycle, but that's just semantics. My point is that the cycle itself is a contradiction of capitalism, where having it succeed in its natural processes leaves it unable to function properly, until it goes nuts for awhile and suffers a collapse and loses much of those gains.

A non-contradictory process would be one that doesn't suffer from its own success in this way, and has a virtuous cycle that simply turns success into more success instead.

Yes, capitalism will help me figure out whether the vest way to produce more grain under current conditions is with a horse plow or a tractor, and thus make grain less scarce. Yes, it will stop being useful once we reach post-scarcity of factors of production. That is not a contradiction in any way.

What you are missing is the part where grain becomes so plentiful that its price at market drops below the cost to bring it to market, farmers are forced to leave it rotting in fields, and everyone starves. Again, that's why it's a contradiction, the success of the system leaves the world in a new state which the system was not built for and can't accommodate, and the whole thing collapses briefly until the problems it was good at solving exists again.

And that's what happens if you 'don't fix what's not broken': when an excess of abundance drives the price of something too low, no one is incentivized to produce or sell it anymore, and it paradoxically becomes more difficult to find.

That's why we use things like IP laws and price fixing and paying farmers to not grow crops and etc. etc. etc., to prevent that type of collapse and dysfunction when capitalism succeeds in creating a situation it cannot itself function in.

But that type of artificial scarcity and restrictive regulation is, again, it's own type of contradiction: the success of capitalism necessitates and inevitably produces imposed limiters that evaporate much of the potential gain from capitalist innovations.

My point is that the cycle itself is a contradiction of capitalism, where having it succeed in its natural processes leaves it unable to function properly, until it goes nuts for awhile and suffers a collapse and loses much of those gains.

My point is that it's a very unusual usage of "contradiction". What you're describing is a self-correcting mechanism.

What you are missing is the part where grain becomes so plentiful that its price at market drops below the cost to bring it to market, farmers are forced to leave it rotting in fields.

No, I'm not. If that happens, but there are other scarce good, the capitalist system directs investment into those goods instead, stopping short of pushing a particular good to post scarcity before it makes sense. Goods going to waste was more often a feature of centrally planned systems, rather than capitalism.

When all factors of production, and therefore all consumer goods are no longer scarce, capitalism stops making sense. That's not a contradiction, that's the system's explicitly acknowledged limit.

That's why we use things like IP laws and price fixing and paying farmers to not grow crops and etc. etc. etc., to prevent that type of collapse and dysfunction when capitalism succeeds in creating a situation it cannot itself function in.

I don't think you established that it cannot function in those situations. Calling a corrective phase something dramatic like "the collapse" doesn't prove that the system ceased to function. Further, your own logic clearly showed that these "preventive" measures caused the very things that are supposed to be "contradictions" of capitalism.

Regarding semantics, I don't know what to tell you, this is a standard academic example for 'the contradictions of capitalism.' Maybe whoever translated Marx originally should have used a different word, I don't know, I don't think that's very important.

But importantly, I do think 'self-correcting mechanism' is way too charitable, and has connotations that miss the point here.

In the case where marginally lower employment leads to marginally lower resource prices leads to marginally higher investment in manufacturing leads back to marginally higher employment again, that's a self-correcting mechanism.

In the case where marginally lower employment leads to disinvestment in manufacturing and investment in financialization and speculation instead, and this process creates a feedback loop that drives more and more of the economy into those sectors until the bubble bursts and there's a large-scale recession, that's not really describing minor course corrections anymore. It's describing a cyclical failure where capitalism cannot function under it's own success, which I think is reasonably described as a contradiction.

When all factors of production, and therefore all consumer goods are no longer scarce, capitalism stops making sense. That's not a contradiction, that's the system's explicitly acknowledged limit.

It feels like we agree on the mechanisms here, and disagree about what to call them or how society reacts to them, or something?

Like, yeah, Marx acknowledged that capitalism inherently produces conditions under which it can no longer function successfully, and needs to be replaced with new systems which can successfully manage the abundance it produced. That's the cliff notes version of one section of his historical materialism.

Capitalists don't explicitly acknowledge that! Standard capitalist rhetoric is, as far as I can tell, that capitalism is just permanently and forever the best way to run an economy, under any circumstances, and any attempts to interfere with or subvert or replace it will only cause suffering and dysfunction.

It's not the case that capitalists are keeping a list of sectors of teh economy where capitalism has succeeded in creating post-scarcity and is no longer needed in that sector and that sector can be handed off to central planning or w/e because capitalism can't handle it anymore. They think capitalism can and should handle everything, and the cases where they insist on that even though they're wrong create the contradiction.

If that happens, but there are other scarce good, the capitalist system directs investment into those goods instead, stopping short of pushing a particular good to post scarcity before it makes sense. Goods going to waste was more often a feature of centrally planned systems, rather than capitalism.

>During World War I, farmers worked hard to produce record crops and livestock. When prices fell they tried to produce even more to pay their debts, taxes and living expenses. In the early 1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In some cases, the price of a bushel of corn fell to just eight or ten cents. Some farm families began burning corn rather than coal in their stoves because corn was cheaper. Sometimes the countryside smelled like popcorn from all the corn burning in the kitchen stoves.

Sadly, no, goods do go to waste or cease being produced under unregulated capitalism; that's one of the reasons we have so many regulations today, which avoid the worst of these tragedies while also capping the amount of benefit capitalism can accrue to society.

Again, this is a contradiction: capitalism is so good at making goods cheap that we need laws to make them more expensive, or else capitalism can't properly distribute them anymore and no one can get enough of them.

Regarding semantics, I don't know what to tell you, this is a standard academic example for 'the contradictions of capitalism.'

Typically the most productive way to push these kind of conversations forward is to go back to definitions, to make sure if the difference of opinion stems from people merely using different definitions.

The reference to academia is a bit troubling, you make it sound like you don't really believe these arguments yourself, just relaying someone else's thoughts.

In the case where marginally lower employment leads to disinvestment in manufacturing and investment in financialization and speculation instead, and this process creates a feedback loop that drives more and more of the economy into those sectors until the bubble bursts and there's a large-scale recession, that's not really describing minor course corrections anymore. It's describing a cyclical failure where capitalism cannot function under it's own success, which I think is reasonably described as a contradiction.

Why? By your own logic, the failure is cyclical, which means it is followed by a recovery. The general trajectory of capitalism, even taking these periodic crashes into account, is clearly that of growth. If you compare it to the results of systems that were supposed to be an alternative to capitalism, the contrast is even more stark. So I just don't see anything contradictory in it, and it does indeed look like a self-correcting system.

Capitalists don't explicitly acknowledge that!

Then it looks like you're just completely unfamiliar with capitalist theory. They go to great lengths to point out that the entire purpose of the system is "rational allocation of scarce resources". That statement alone is at least double-redundant by my count, which shows how much they wanted to hammer the point home.

During World War I, farmers worked hard to produce record crops and livestock. When prices fell they tried to produce even more to pay their debts, taxes and living expenses. In the early 1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In some cases, the price of a bushel of corn fell to just eight or ten cents. Some farm families began burning corn rather than coal in their stoves because corn was cheaper. Sometimes the countryside smelled like popcorn from all the corn burning in the kitchen stoves.

Again, this is a contradiction: capitalism is so good at making goods cheap that we need laws to make them more expensive

3 times cheaper than nowadays is indeed a good deal, but hardly post-scarcity. The fact that they were burning it instead of coal, is just a statement about the relative availability of coal, and we do it too nowadays (never heard of bio-fuels)? In fact, if anything this is probably an example of the rationality of capitalism relative to other systems. A central planner insisting "corn is for eating, not for heating" would be wasting coal, while letting an abundant resource go to waste. Also, the 1930's cannot be in any reasonable way be described as an example of unregulated capitalism.

The WWI example is even worse. War, especially in the past, has always been a time of great uncertainty, so it's not surprising people ended up producing too much or too little of something, because they were expecting the war to go a certain way, that didn't come to pass. None of this is an example of capitalism making goods so cheap that we need laws to make them more expensive. To show that, you'd need to show that the producers refused to correct production afterwards. Otherwise, it's not a contradiction at all.

The Israeli-Palestinian war has me wondering why I can’t think of many global Israeli companies, Israeli intellectuals with global reach, or Israeli billionaires who I would describe as Israeli first (born there and spent there first 18 years). There are many dual citizens. For this exercise people like Roman Abramovich are not Israeli he’s Russian with Israeli citizenship. Same with Adelson. I can also name many intellectuals with Jewish roots who are not Israeli.

I came up with this list for Israeli companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_Israel

And this list for richest Israelis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israelis_by_net_worth

I was going to exclude the Ofer’s because they grew up rich but looks like their dad made their money in Israel before Israeli was Israel so they count. There’s a few more that seemed to be atleast half raised in Israeli. I’d count someone like Adam Neuman as Israeli who left to build in a bigger market.

Maybe I’m missing something but being that Israel is about 40% of global Jewish population I feel like there should be far more heavyweights raised in Israel.

Is this because of an economic factor - economies of scale makes it easier to build globally significant firms in the US/Russia since there is easier access to a large market. And American Jews have it far easier than Israeli Jews to access that scale? I’m not sure why this would apply to academics. I can name a lot of firms and people everyone has heard about from Russia/US but WeWork and Teva would be the only globally significant firms I would assign to Israel.

Or are born and raised Israeli Jews preoccupied with building a state and therefore haven’t built major globally significant things.

Look at the list, 10 banks and insurance companies, a real estate company that is basically finance and 2 others. Niches such as finance, law and medicine don't work if a big portion of the population engages in them. A small portion of jews in a country allows them to be heavily overrepresented in businesses that take small fees on huge volumes such as finance, online marketing or media. If they are running their own country they have to do nursing, construction, drive taxis and produce things. A well organized group in NYC can find ways to skim cents of dollars. The Israelis have to do something they historically haven't been good at, produce products.

Despite the super genius jew stereotype Israeli students preform poorly in school. Even just looking at the jewish portion, they are basically on par with Portugese children.

With almost no natural resources, large numbers of ethnic minorities, a more divided country than most countries its size and mediocre school results doesn't exactly indicate wealthy nation.

AFAIK Mizrahim don't have especially high average IQ (as I understand it their lower average SES is a point of contention in Israel), so they don't really count for purposes of measuring the size of Israel's Jewish talent pool. I also wonder about self-selection of Israeli Ashkenazim. Maybe they didn't get the cream of the crop?

HBD is one factor I thought of. The other was market size. Both seem to have some relevance. But I asks questions to see if people have other ideas.

I still feel like they should have one national champion that is a household name. The Irish have Stripe thought they had to move to California to really get going. Skype from Estonia. For a smallish country it still feels off. I guess they have Teva and WeWork.

Filmmaking makes sense there isn’t much globally as America has more stories to tell. Hedge Funds wouldn’t require the same amount of scale to take off. 30 dudes in an office park can do that anywhere.

Needing people to actually produce domestic goods instead of skimming large markets as noted below makes some sense. Though one hedge fund pulling in a billion in yearly fees would finance a lot of imports. A cultural story like needing to produce more basic goods/self sufficiency is more interesting than falling back on hbd.

Your two links appear to be identical.

Good catch will edit

Harari would be an immediately obvious example of an Israeli intellectual with global reach.

Maybe global popular reach but among those who should be his actual peers - specialist scholars - he is considered a bit of a lightweight no?

I would have thought Amdocs would be on the list, but it's not there. It's a 10 billion market cap firm with sales of $5 bn and profit of $0.5 bn. While incorporated in Guernsey it was founded in Israel.

They have pretty substantial power in telecom software (originally billing).

Is the left-right distinction really the relevant political metric we should look at the in US?

The president of NYU's student bar association lost their job offer after expressing support for Hamas. I say they, because it's a trans person who also happens to be black. Can you hit higher on the diversity bingo? Well, take the wrong side where Israel is involved and apparently that does not help you. And it's not like NYU is a conservative campus.

I'm sure this person has a history of anti-White statements (that is usually the case with black progressives). But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism. So, this isn't a case of being a leftist or a rightist. It's a case of being against perceived Jewish interests. Sometimes people talk about the progressive stack and we have once again found out that being black and trans is no defence if you go against Jews. No such punishment against being anti-White. This seems to imply two things:

  1. The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.

  2. People who claim Jews are White must explain why making anti-White statements rarely carry punishments but going against Jewish interests does. In other words, Jews have relative privilege in America in a way that is not available to Whites.

The reason for losing that support has nothing to do with being pro/anti-Jew. It has to do with the viral videos of Hamas actively massacring civilians who were not threats to them in any way. Right now, the world is entirely aware of what Hamas is doing. That very much sticks in people's minds when they see a person endorse Hamas. The fact that you jumped straight to "Jews are at the top of the progressive totem pole" is insane.

But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.

College students have been engaging in consequence-free (well, except for Rachel Corrie) protesting of Israel for decades.

I mean will the red tribe start using this stuff as a weapon against progressives the way ‘racism’ gets used against conservatives? There’s clearly appetite for it(and if you have to string up nick fuentes to do it, who cares, he was a clown).

This was a massive element of the taking down of Corbyn's Labour party in the UK, the press were on a hunt for any and all potentially anti-semitic comments from leftwing figures. (To be clear, they did find a fair few.)

That was coming from the pro-establishment left much more than the right.

Yeah? I'd say it was both, there were loads of gotcha articles by Times reporters for instance that dug up internet comments made by MPs in their youth and such.

Really feels like you're fitting the evidence to the theory here. Prominent Jews are still cancelled for making racist/transphobic remarks. It's not that Jews are invincible, it's that white people are seen as a fair target.

is no defence if you go against Jews

I think dropping the context around timing here is important. As of now it's not socially-policing pro-palestine view points. It's socially-policing those who support it immediately after a terrorist attack.

If anything it's putting common decency and humanity above intersectionality & showing it's limits.

I'm not sure we're seeing any of the real pushback come from those inside intersectionality disciplines to even make your arguments. Now if/when they do you bring up some points, but it's the none-crazy world that normally lets intersectionality devotes just ramble is finally speaking up.

It's socially-policing those who support it immediately after a terrorist attack.

It's not even just that! There are a number of standard pro-Palestine viewpoints in that message, but "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." isn't a middle-of-the-road pro-Palestine viewpoint, it's a pro-Hamas-massacring-civilians-without-consequences viewpoint. Merely pointing out Israel's past wrongdoing with such timing might have been tasteless, but excusing Hamas' wrongdoing is what crossed the line to outright evil.

But as long as I'm in @MelodicBerries ' thread:

explain why making anti-White statements rarely carry punishments but going against Jewish interests does.

My hypothesis would be that anti-White statements of this magnitude and timing aren't nearly so common (or perhaps even existent) among people in the "head of a broad public first-world organization" category. In the wake of that Las Vegas festival massacre, was there anyone like a student bar association president who said "Well, country music fans, you know they had it coming" but got away with that?

I'm not generally thrilled with the way "safety" gets used as a buzzword to cancel people, but there are "safety" fears where your potential coworker might say mean words in the office, and then there are safety fears where your potential coworker believes innocent blood is a good way to terrorize their enemies and you can't help but notice that you happen to be filled with conveniently located blood.

I'm sure this person has a history of anti-White statements (that is usually the case with black progressives).

Were any of these statements (which I'll presume you read, because just making that sort of thing up has no place here, right?) as bad as excusing mass murder while the bodies are still being counted? If so, then your ethnic bias theory would deserve another look. But if not, then I hope you'll reexamine the "terrorist massacres are especially bad" theory and figure out why (a different direction of ethnic bias, perhaps?) it wasn't as easy as it should have been to come up with that theory on your own.

My hypothesis would be that anti-White statements of this magnitude and timing aren't nearly so common (or perhaps even existent) among people in the "head of a broad public first-world organization" category.

Off the top of my head some of the public statements about the race-motivated prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine would seem to contradict this. Not to mention it actually becoming U.S. government policy and killing many thousands of people. There are probably closer analogues, but I remember that particular one well and wrote this post about it at the time:

The CDC has officially recommended ACIP's vaccine distribution plan that deprioritizes the elderly, even though they estimate this will save less lives, in part because more elderly people are white

The most overt quote mentioned in that post would be this one:

The New York Times: The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?

Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

Or from the same article a quote from a member of the ACIP committee (the people responsible for writing the CDC's recommended prioritization):

Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions. But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well, noted Lisa A. Prosser, a professor of health policy and decision sciences at the University of Michigan. “To me the issue of ethics is very significant, very important for this country,” Dr. Peter Szilagyi, a committee member and a pediatrics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said at the time, “and clearly favors the essential worker group because of the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers among essential workers.”

I think even the dry language of ACIP itself would be beyond the pale, like when they list "Racial and ethnic minority groups under-represented among adults >65" in red as a reason to not prioritize them. If it was instead "Whites under-represented" or "Jews over-represented" I do not think they would have remained in charge of writing the CDC's recommendations, nor do I think states would have adopted those recommendations.

You could argue that the issue is just that killing tens/hundreds of thousands through healthcare policy is much less dramatic that killing thousands through direct violence, even when the healthcare policy is explicitly racially motivated. That is the main reason I said the analogy is not particularly close. But at the same time saying "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life." is less extreme than actually saying that loss of life is a good thing, let alone using your position in the U.S. government bureaucracy to deliberately cause that loss of life and being permitted to do so.

Regardless of exactly where the line is for anti-white statements and (more importantly) anti-white policies, it is obvious that they would not and could not have done something like this in the name of increasing black or jewish deaths instead. It is the product of explicit institutional racial bias. (Note that their policy actually did kill more black people because of how much more vulnerable the elderly are, it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. And naturally it killed more jewish people as well.) Of course, that doesn't prove anything about the ordering of favored groups against each other like the OP was arguing. It just shows that social justice disfavors white people and is influential enough to shape the decisions of institutions like the CDC/ACIP and the states that followed their recommendations or prioritized by race outright.

Those are good examples, logically; I just doubt that public reaction is "logical but philo-semitic", I think it's "emotional". Jewish-Americans are classified as white, and average older than other white Americans, so they were also getting burned by the same policy.

You could argue that the issue is just that killing tens/hundreds of thousands through healthcare policy is much less dramatic that killing thousands through direct violence, even when the healthcare policy is explicitly racially motivated.

I think I'd have to. You're right that that policy was a heinous crime, but it's the sort of crime whose magnitude can only be reasonably grasped through statistics, rather than through video of screaming bloody women being kidnapped and festivals strewn with bodies.

Heinous crimes in healthcare regulation, from a logical standpoint, are a dime a dozen, and nobody seems to do anything about most of them. The FDA dragged its feet on approving beta-blockers for a decade, with something like a hundred thousand deaths in that time of people who could have lived years longer, and I think literally the only person I've seen vociferously complain about it was David Friedman, a source with negligible popularity.

COVID healthcare decisions were an especially weird instance of this. Pfizer changed its vaccine test protocols from their original design to avoid examining the results until after the election, with no better public reason than "er, we were kinda nervous" handwaving, in the face of public demands that they not give "the Trump vaccine" a big high-profile win right before people went to the polls ... and this time I think the biggest champion of "shouldn't we have gotten a bigger head start and saved tens of thousands more lives" was Steve Sailer, a source with negative popularity. When half the public seemed to think that the vaccines are a deadly big Pharma scam, and the other half of the public seemed to think that they're magic spells from technocrat experts (Biden said flat-out "You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations" during the Delta wave; even the original tests were only 90% effective!), is it really so surprising that nobody was rising up to complain that the technocrat experts were making mistakes allocating vaccine doses?

There was some… fairly extreme partisanship in 2020-21, and the Covid hawks had very strong and obvious reasons to come down on one side rather than the other.

Jewish concerns are an exception case which exist outside the Progressive hierarchy, because they have their own self-contained culture in which ethnic pride is good (indeed, obligatory). I think It’s important when we discuss “Jewish interests” to note that it’s a small percent of the Jewish whole who are committed to extreme pro-Jewish lobbying, but that these are the ones who are wealthy and/or have courted the wealthy, and have ties to Israel and rabbinical schools. It wouldn’t matter if 70% of Jews were hypothetically pro-Hamas because the remaining 30% are the ones who are well-connected to wealthy politically-active Jewry and all the important rabbis and organizations.

If you are envious of Jewish power then you can build up your own racially-conscious religion which emphasizes shared experiences of tragedy and historical uniqueness. It really is that simple. They can exert influence because they have a self-contained cultural ecosystem where “love of race” is encouraged and comprises half the point of the traditions and rituals.

Is this ironic? Are you doing that thing everyone figured that guy who kept deleting his ops was doing, making deliberately terrible arguments that actually weaken the side you appear to be supporting? Why?

What specifically do you disagree with in my comment? The OP is asserting that Jews sit at the top of some progressive status hierarchy totem pole; I’m saying that instead they are outside it due to their culture. Then I explained why I think this is, and what you can do if you envy their position.

They were part of the stack when those tiki torch protests were going on, and when teenagers scribble swastikas on bathroom walls, and when Kanye went off his meds. Everyone is part of the stack/totem pole - that's one of the problems with it, you can't opt out, you are stuck being judged based on characteristics you have no influence over. What the op is missing is that the stack order changes depending on which grifter is most influential at the time, and that instability is part of the point - if you knew exactly how it was ordered, you might hate it but at least you can work with it and plan around it.

As for your suggestion to the 'envious' (sliding in the implication that jealousy is the only reason anyone could object to an ethnic hierarchy), "just go make your own 7000 year old religion" is one of the most ridiculous versions of the "well go make your own magazine/news channel/social media platform/government" meme I've ever heard.

But not every social judgment and censure comes from the “progressive stack”. The reason that Jews can exert the influence they are exerting right now re: Israel is that they have an ethno-centric culture built around self-love which doesn’t care an iota for the progressive stack. That’s why we see Bill Ackman asking for the name of every Harvard student who signed a petition (blaming Israel for the violence) so that he can prevent them from ever working on Wall Street. It’s why Jewish donors can prevent human rights leaders from getting positions at Harvard because they criticized Israel. This exists independently of any progressive status hierarchy.

You can make a religion tomorrow provided that you earnestly believe in the religion. It doesn’t have to be 6000 years old; Talmudic Judaism is no older than Christianity. Mormonism isn’t even 200 years old.

Ackman gets away with that stuff because he is allowed to get away with it, and he is allowed to get away with it because of the position of Jews in the stack. Everyone in the higher tiers of the stack gets to hold onto solidarity and exclusivity that would be called dangerous and frightening if done by a straight white man. Black people also put ingroup solidarity above the progressive stack, why aren't you praising them?

In fact you could consider the civil rights movement the religion black Americans started. We can simplify your message to "Be like black Americans." You'll endorse that right?

Fuck this fucking toilet hole of a planet.

Jewish concerns are an exception case which exist outside the Progressive hierarchy, because they have their own self-contained culture in which ethnic pride is good

Is that an exception? I think that progressive culture promotes pride among every ethnicity, except whites. Also, while LGBT is not an ethnicity, it literally has a whole month of pride now. (Even once we have a Wrath month, Envy month, Greed month, Gluttony month, Lust month, and Sloth month, we'll still be 5 sins short of a full calendar of sin.)

But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.

Prior to last Friday, taking an anti-Zionist stance would have gotten you applause in progressive circles. For that matter, you're still clear to say "I'm anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic" as long as you can resist the urge to openly celebrate massacres of Israeli civilians. Before Friday, you were clear to say Israeli civilians should be massacred.

This seems to imply two things

Alternatively, it implies your model is wrong. That it's not as simple as "people higher up the progressive totem pole get to do what they want and Jews are at the top".

Even far left activists, as @roystgnr says, very rarely openly advocate the rape and slaughter of whites in explicit terms. You can link to a handful of tweets about crimes against South African farmers, but I’d wager that’s not something most leftists think or even know about.

So the rhetoric supporting Hamas’ actions is arguably more extreme than the average leftist rhetoric about whites, including demands for reparations from congress or whatever.

(that is usually the case with black progressives)

Citation needed? I don’t even think you’re wrong that someone willing to make maximally-inflammatory statements about Hamas has probably said some racist nonsense. I am skeptical that it describes the average black progressive. Unless you’re playing with definitions, and saying that the Berniebros and tankies don’t count?

Anyway, the people who “talk about the progressive stack” are wrong. Not least because it’s only observed in the breach. There isn’t a defined hierarchy of privilege, at least not in a way that shields certain groups from criticism. That would defeat the purpose of an ever-shifting battlefield of social dynamics. Goodhart’s law is in full effect. Politics is a social game, and any ideology which doesn’t allow playing the game is no use at all.

I would argue that it’s much more practical to reverse the model: is the victim sympathetic? How diverse/marginalized/dispossessed is the subject of an attack? Can it be described as “punching down?”

Such a model explains the usual incidents of a privileged individual condemned for stomping on a marginalized one. But it also covers cases where the privilege isn’t clear, or “live by the sword” situations where the victim becomes the perpetrator. The difference is who played a better social game.

It explains why intersectionality gets so much attention, despite its anti-inductive nature; listing all the reasons why a group deserves sympathy is the first step in arguing importance. It explains the need for a monolithic model of systematic bias favoring whites, as otherwise, attacks on the solidly Red “basket of deplorables” would be far more risky.

In this case, Mx. Wickman’s statement came at the expense of one of the all-time classics of sympathetic victims: grieving mothers. Or at least that’s how it was portrayed, since I don’t expect many Israeli parents are reading a law school newsletter. The point is that they became a target not by upsetting a fixed stack, but because they looked like an ass for victim-blaming the one group who looked least blameworthy. Blood in the water.

The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.

This would only follow if, for instance, there was a massacre of black people and jews could make similar remarks about the massacre without being fired. Obviously white people are lower, but that doesn't tell us anything about the ordering of the favored groups, or whether they are ordered in any sort of consistent way to begin with.

I dunno. I’m pretty far into free speech absolutism, but I’d support firing anyone who openly advocates the ongoing mass murder, rape, and torture of civilians for creating a hostile work environment. At a law firm!? Disregarding morals completely, you’d lose every Jewish client, associated business, and employee.

I think this one needs the asterisk that it's the Law school, and the company that dropped their job offer is a law firm. Law is probably one of the most Jewish careers out there. It's entirely plausible that the law firm has enough Jewish associates that they would have major problems if a bunch of them quit, or threatened to, because they hired a Hamas-supporter as a new junior associate. That's gotta be the easiest decision in the world for that firm.

It's also very plausible that if this individual happened to be starting in a substantially less Jewish career, this would have been brushed under the rug.

I think they would have had issues at any branded product firm. I bet Pepsi or Bud Light would have fired them too.

The places they may have been able to survive would be at like some industrial company that only insiders know the brands. Maybe a commodity firm like a coal company. Normal white people though have been fired for far less such as ok hand symbol guy at an electric utility. And all the non-branded businesses tend to be red tribe so they probably wouldn’t mind firing a woke person.

A ‘black trans president of the law student association at NYU’ does not deign to seek employment at a non-branded company.

Is there actually reason to hire them since just by description it is strongly hinted that they will be only trouble

Optics, I guess.

I think it's more that they supported terrorists right after a terrorist massacre of innocent civilians. If they had just kept their mouth shut for a few weeks while this was in the news then they would have been fine. I'm not Jewish and I don't really care about Israel all that much but I also would have wanted this person fired. This person sounds like they are a psychotic narcissist with no impulse control and would be awful to work with. That is on top of being a massive PR liability for the firm.

I posted about this earlier, but this whole saga has been shocking to me how these leftists can't even pretend to have sympathy for real victims of a tragedy FOR JUST A FEW DAYS! Instead, they are crying about Israel propaganda and how there's no evidence that these women slaughtered at the music festival were raped. It's like okay fine they weren't raped (even though let's be honest there's a good chance they were). Instead 250 plus civilians were just shot in cold blood then stripped naked and spat upon (literally) while they drove around in trucks celebrating their death and posting it to social media to humiliate them and their families. Even if you pick out that one piece of information, it's still so awful that the raping really doesn't matter one way or another if a rape happened.

All this person had to do was shut up until Israel messes up and kills civilians in their counter attack and they could have gone back to larping as a freedom fighter while working on Wall Street. This person is not a serious person. This whole saga makes me update my priors that Hanania is right about Civil Rights law being the biggest reason for this. What other reason could there be someone so ridiculous is given such an amazing opportunity and red carpet rolled out to invite them to the elite? The sad part is they will still land on their feet and this will probably end up helping them.

At the end of the day though, this isn't really their fault. They were trained to make these kinds of comments with no repercussions. In fact, they probably benefited from these kinds of hot takes. If you look back at their social media history and application letters to elite institutions, it was probably full of similar remarks that they were praised for. And any negative reactions they probably dismissed as bigotry or that the people on the left criticizing them were "liberals". However, they finally ran up against something that at least humans have enough dignity left to hold them accountable for at least for a few months. People don't want to work with someone who supports terrorists who murder innocent civilians and records it for social media. However, in a few months, this will pass and they will have some other elite position making lots of money. This is just the world we live in.

All this person had to do was shut up until Israel messes up and kills civilians in their counter attack and they could have gone back to larping as a freedom fighter while working on Wall Street.

Israel has already done this. Israel has already been doing this for some time, including shooting unarmed journalists. They even sent police to physically assault the pallbearers of her coffin during her funeral (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/24/un-israelis-fired-shots-that-killed-journalist-abu-akleh). It isn't like Hamas' latest attack is some sudden new change in the conflict - the Israelis already have done all the things you have said they should have waited for them to do, and has repeatedly been doing these things for years, rape included. While I absolutely agree that this person is larping as a freedom fighter despite having one of the most privileged positions in the country (if you are even a contender for a job in BIGLAW you are actually privileged in the real sense of the word), if I try to see things from their perspective it isn't particularly hard to understand.

From everything I know about modern day left wing political ideology, it is very clearly diametrically opposed to almost everything about the state of Israel. Israel is a white supremacist (jews do not get to renounce white privilege), colonial ethnostate that is brutally oppressing people of colour, while at the same time being extremely friendly towards Trump and the republican party. Left-wing activists frequently and publicly compare the treatment of the Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa, a regime that they condemned and boycotted in no uncertain terms. Israel is a far, FAR greater example of the kind of things that modern left wing politics define themselves in opposition to than any European society or indeed America itself. I'm not one of them, but if you're ensconced in that ideology, Israel is already practically an illegitimate state. Why then would you not celebrate one of the most visible incarnations of a political ideology you hate receiving violent resistance? Factor in the left-wing idolisation of figures like Che Guevara and a shift in attitude towards "punching nazis" being an admirable activity and this all makes sense from their perspective.

From the point of view of the western left and centre-left, Israel is also just a really right-wing country in a way which makes it less sympathetic. The only reason why the current (until the formation of the national unity war government) "National Camp" coalition between the right, the far right and the religious right doesn't have a permanent majority is that Naftali Bennett is outraged by Bibi's corruption - if Likud dumped him for a non-crooked leader then there would be a solid 55% of the vote for aligned right-wing parties. And the principal opposition comes from the liberal centre-right (Yesh Atid) and a bunch of retired generals (what is left of Blue & White).

The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.

I don't think this is true. For example, when black nationalists (not sure how better to describe Black Hebrew Israelites) murder 5 Jews in a terrorist attack, progressive sources just leave the ethnicity/photo/motives of the perpetrator out.

https://archive.ph/VyNhJ https://archive.ph/hqN5U#selection-1714.3-1724.0

When there is an increase in antisemitic attacks, there's a distinct lack of curiosity as to who is doing them - at most a brief mention that it's (surprisingly!) not white nationalists.

https://archive.ph/zL1P1 https://archive.ph/XOjPZ

You need to look on social media to find out who actually did it: https://www.facebook.com/assemblymandovhikind/videos/1899927243445157/

I think this guy was just exceptionally dumb for doing it literally 1-2 days later.

Simpler explanation - a strain of influential white people enjoy being culturally pegged, influential jews don't.

The reason why whites are at the bottom is not because they were put at the bottom, but because they chose it. To revel in the guilt. Don't ask me why, but they do. This trans black woman activist has probably met and insulted enough powerful people with means to end her career or something milder - like hiring someone to kneecap her. But they didn't.

Jews push back. Powerful whites don't yet because it is usually other whites that pay the price.

The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.

If a Jew expressed support for a white nationalist group or a Christian anti-trans group, I'd expect them to lose a student bar association job.


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