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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   21283 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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There is an Israel-Gaza Megathread now.

Thanks, meant to post it there.

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?

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 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.

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’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 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...

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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).

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?

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.

Not sure if this is an original take or simply restating the obvious, but the Israel/Gaza is a Moloch trap with no exit, because the players of the game theory matrix are necessarily hawks, and perpetual violence is a win-win for both parties:

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/moloch-in-the-middle-east

I don't think "no exit" is justified by your evidence and argument. Most obviously, not everyone is at war all the time, which implies there exist countervailing forces to the ones you cite (most obviously, peaceniks who want power and support peaceniks on the other side).

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

(relatively) young

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

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.

Vibe shift?

I lost count of how many anglos, jews and anglo-jews on the center-left/left that, in the past days, had a "Conversion on the road to Damascus", openly admitting on Twitter that their views on the Left were utterly wrong and that they had no idea their side was so full of apologists for jew-slaughter. And I am talking about big figures, including some of the loudest neoliberal mouths, admitting grudgingly that the Right-wing view of academia had some points.

Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?

In my view, there are still some enormous obstacle to shift like these, primarly the enormous influence of academia on journalism and èlites policy and opinion-making in the west, and the machine of the anglo-left working in case of another menace from Trump, that can rapidly rebuild the ranks. Another interesting side of the discourse is what will happen in Europe, where it is true that there are way less Jews, but the Right has way more influence between young and important people. By tasting the environment, almost everyone apart from the aggravated minorities and feminists groups are very, very angry about all of this.

I do not know if it is ok to post this here or in the Gaza thread, if it is wrong I will move it there.

I wonder how Jewish academics are going to handle this. Will they update their believes about their woke colleagues and students, and if so will they work to change hiring and admissions policies?

Many Jewish academics I know are very anti-Israel. I knew one who specifically asked, "Where can I find a pro-Palestinian synagogue?"

Will that not be reevaluated with Hamas being revealed to be the savages the IDF always said they were?

For my part: Islamist Jihadists are assholes, who knew? Sure, kill them, whatever. I don't care.

The collective punishment by a superior force on a group that are not allowed to leave seems bad though.

Do I have suggestions? No. Do I care about that? Also no.
All I can do is point at the latest "collateral damage'd" picture of some western journalist that stopped a stray bullet with their forehead in an empty field or the latest video of a settler executing a Palestinian family while the IDF watches and say "Less of that please".

Hard to say. I have noticed that a lot of "peace" movement people have already started dealing with cognitive dissonance on this point by amping up their focus on Israel's actions.

What "revealed"? Hamas never hid it. The apologetics ranged from "But Israel was worse", "Israel made them do it by oppressing the Palestinians", "Israel had it coming because they oppress the Palestinians", "But what about the settlements?", "mumble mumble Irgun" to "Israel is a sovereign nation and should be held to higher standards", "Israel is a US ally and should be held to higher standards", "Israel is a strong country and should be able to solve all the problems unilaterally without actually using that strength, Hamas is weak and must do what they have to" etc.

Revealed means ‘denial becomes much more difficult verging on impossible’. Agree that the information was always there, but now you don’t need to listen to icky red tribers to hear it.

I've seen more and more complaining about the far-left on reddit, and more people upvoting/saying things like "X sucks for men", etc. on places like /r/neoliberal and /r/AskReddit . I think this has been increasing since around 2020.

I agree there has been an uptick recently (e.g. the top post on /r/neoliberal is complaining about a professor labeling students as colonizer or colonized) and the second highest post on /r/AskReddit is "What are some examples of body shaming towards men that go unnoticed?"), but society-wide vibes change over months and years, not days.

but society-wide vibes change over months and years, not days.

COVID and Floyd proved this wasn't true, as long as the right people were driving the change.

I mean that’s kind of the nature of the beast, isn’t it? Student activists don’t exactly listen to their elders even if they’re theoretically on the same side- you can’t keep them following orders forever.

It seems you can, as long as you're giving orders in a particular direction.

Well yeah, that’s the point- they don’t follow orders to heel and sooner or later they’ll break the leash.

But, and this is the but, anyone who’s ever owned an attack dog knows ‘break’ is an important command. And student activists are 20 yo dumbasses, they’re going to attack load bearing walls. George soros and the dnc or whoever else you hold responsible for these people don’t want that- they want to make society slightly shittier in some ways, but not to burn the whole thing down.

The immediate COVID changes in the society didn't stick, though. I started observing a definite vibe shift on societies wanting to walk the path to normality for good at the latest in the winter of 2021-2022, and remember that observing this got some pushback of the "no, it's going to be lockdowns and vaccine mandates and masks from here to eternity, they're never going to give up" variety. Jury's still out on the Floyd protest shift, though the actual results of the "defund the police" movement regarding the police budgets tended up to be shortlived, from what I've understood.

movement regarding the police budgets tended up to be shortlived, from what I've understood.

The policemen who got fed up with the nonsense, and retired, did not unretire. Laws that effectively allow you to loot a store, as long as what you steal is below a certain value are still in effect. Permissive, easy on crime prosecutors are still in office.

When I look at Instagram, I’d say it seems less pronounced. The hardcore StandWithUs (Sheldon Adelson’s group) types are obviously sharing all the gory videos and posting reports about beheaded babies, but then again they were the same people cheering loudly when Trump moved the embassy and I know for a fact a substantial number voted for Trump, they’re Florida/Vegas/Long Island right or right-adjacent Jews and so hardly the median Jewish American. The outright radical leftists are either fully unrepentant or, in the case where presumably they have relatives there, or would feel / have felt the wrath of friends and family, post a both sides message but make clear that ultimate responsibility rests with Israeli apartheid or whatever. Generic progressives seem to just repost tweets or stories that say “supporting Hamas is antisemitic” or “murdering children isn’t liberation” or something, but they’re not going full bloodlust or demanding the bombing of Gaza either, that’s just the StandWithUs types.

If the Gazans get starved or large numbers of civilians die, all but the first group will start posting stories calling on the Israeli government to stop, and/or calling them genocidal eventually.

Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?

I don't really understand how this paragraph connects to the first paragraph. "I am surprised by how some prominent people on the left are willing to excuse atrocities committed by Hamas, therefore immigration and DEI are bad." How does the premise connect to the conclusion? I don't think most left-ish people's support for immigration or DEI are premised on whether or not certain other leftists will excuse atrocities committed by Hamas.

The premise is supposed to be "I've noticed that the people who keep banging on about equality and justice and nonviolence are actually just as bloodthirsty and vile as they paint their enemies to be, maybe that means they're lying about other things as well" but in practice it doesn't really work like that at all as the second half of that never comes into play.

I'm not saying no one has ever changed their minds on account of discovering that some of their co-partisans were extremists, but it's not common. If anything, it's more typical to find people doubling down and insisting the criticism is a vicious smear and further proof of their adversaries' derangement.

"I am surprised by how some prominent people on the left are willing to excuse atrocities committed by Hamas, therefore immigration and DEI are bad."

I think it's likely more, "I am surprised by how the same set of ideals that led me to support what I support (i.e. immigration and DEI in this particular case, which are also two of the most prominent issues broadly supported by the people of this ideological cluster) also led others to support things I find heinous by my own values (i.e. excusing atrocities committed by Hamas in this particular case). This leads me to question how much and how well I understood these ideals; perhaps I ought to analyze them more carefully, in a way that leaves me genuinely open to changing my mind such that I no longer support things that I support now (i.e. such as immigration or DEI)."

I personally experienced a (likely much more minor) version of this around 10 years ago, in observing the justification of blatant and bald-faced lies done by some of the more extreme (though relative to me at the time, these people were barely extreme) people on my end of the political spectrum. This wasn't some "EUREKA!" moment where I cast off my previous beliefs in one fell swoop, but I was compelled to analyze the empirical, logical, and philosophical bases of my ideology at the time, resulting in me, over time, learning to throw away some (many? Most? That might be too optimistic) of the more absurd policy positions that I used to support before.

So I know it's possible, but I honestly doubt that this will or would cause any sort of meaningful shift at the national level. Not because of the control that the left has over academia and journalism, but mainly because people just don't really tend to think things through like that. There will likely be some people who go through something similar to what I did, but there will also likely be some people who become more sold on the correctness of the ideology because they enjoy and admire the bloodthirstiness openly displayed by the slaughter-apologists, and it's pretty much impossible to tell which number will be higher, or who will be in which category.

Personally I expect the views of a lot of people on the far left to have shifted about specifically, narrowly, Palestinian culture and its current capacity for peaceful statehood. I expect it to become somewhat less fashionable on the left to justify brutality by Palestinian militants against Israel and the general sympathy toward it among the Palestinian populace, even for people who consider Israel an obviously bad settler colonialist apartheid state on the wrong side of history.

Do I expect that shift to translate into a proportional priors update on related issues domestically? Not really. I think it's too easy to rationalize away as, no, that's them, that's unique, it's a regrettable but isolated case, the situation over here isn't like the situation over there, and the people we're talking about over here aren't like the people over there.

I'm an American thinking about the response from the American far left about American immigration policy and culture issues, though. The needle movement elsewhere on domestic issues may be more dramatic.

OP might be speaking from a german perspective. Germany has recently gained a large population of arab/muslim immigrants, whose views on Israel (open celebration of the Hamas attacks) have now opened a new conversation on "do we really want people like that in our country?" The issue has given a clear example of what can be bad about unrestricted immigration, disqualfying unrestricted immigration optimism and validating the points of the right.

It being about antisemitism also means that the normal oppression hierarchy doesn't apply, and that it's harder to dismiss the critics as Nazis, which helps the topic along.

I'm not seeing a real vibe shift here. The pro-establishment left in the US has always been pro-Israel (anti-Israel views are the only left-wing views people were ever cancelled for in establishment institutions, with Steven Salaita the most famous example) and the anti-establishment left has always been anti-Israel, and often rabidly so. The pro-establishment left have always despised the anti-establishment left with the same level of vitriol and for the same reasons that the pro-establishment right despise the MAGA right, and anti-anti-Semitism is used to enforce the left edge of the Overton window in the same way that anti-racism is used to enforce the right edge. It's just that they kept quiet about it for a while after the George Floyd asphyxiation because they were afraid of being called racist.

"The left are cheering Hamas" on your social media dashboard because the people you follow are signal-boosting a small number of idiots, some of whom are tenured academics or leaders of usual-suspects lefty student groups, but most of whom are randos. This is the usual suspects coming out in force - anyone on the pro-establishment left who are surprised by this is an idiot, and I suspect most of the pro-establishment lefties claiming to be surprised are faking it.

The number of Democratic office-holders, university administrators at Dean/Deputy Provost level or above, NYT journalists, or woke corporate executives who are saying these things is negligible. I'm sure that Jewish-American elites don't like the fact that the Squad have called for de-escalation and said that the US should not fund Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but this is the kind of milquetoast stuff that anti-establishment figures who are testing the edges of the Overton window say, not "The left are cheering Hamas". Rashida Tlaib has gone further than the rest because she is Palestinian - again the fact that she is rabidly anti-Israel should surprise zero people who are paying attention.

Another interesting side of the discourse is what will happen in Europe

In Western Europe, normies ran out of sympathy for both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict decades ago. Everyone except the usual suspects on the anti-establishment left is lining up to condemn the latest round of Hamas atrocities because they are unusually barbaric, but in a month's time we are going to be back to "Hundreds dead in Middle East. Bear shat in woods. Football scores to follow." I can't tell Arabs from Europeans in the dark, but the pro-Hamas protest outside the Israeli embassy in London looked like it was majority south Asian Muslim.

There's a somewhat stronger pro-Israel reaction on Finnish social media than I've seen previously, but that might be because the Ukraine war has made it easier to associate Russia with all manner of "anti-West" political forces, including Palestinian militants in this case.

I am definitely seeing pro-Ukrainian forces trying to spin up a Russia/Iran/NK/Hamas axis of evil meme. This has the advantage relative to the Bush-era axis of evil that the countries in the alleged axis are actually allies, whereas the Bush-era axis of evil, while evil, was about as far from being an axis as it is possible to be.

Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?

No. Because what I'm seeing happening on twitter is that these people who are having these revelations are only admitting fault in this one, narrow, blinkered way, and immediately Gell-Mann Amnesia-ing when it comes to everything else the left loves. So the guy who admits "okay, maybe the right were correct that BLM were a scummy group" will still then turn around and support open borders and DEI completely uncritically. One facet of the edifice falling does not cause questioning of the whole structure; rather, the internalised rationalisation is "wow, those guys were REALLY GOOD at concealing how shitty they were" and not "wow, I really blinded myself to how obviously shitty those guys are". It saves more ego to believe you were deceived by someone else, than to admit actual fault on your part. The right being correct about the issue is treated as a rare fluke, a broken clock moment, instead of a reason to re-examine all your existing beliefs. Because doing that is hard and painful.

Yeah. The big BLM organization - Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation - is probably grifting or at least enriching the pocketbooks of its members a good deal more than is customary for nonprofits. It's possible that they might simply be unsophisticated n00bs and thus not all that good at being corrupt and grifting successfully, and you never hear about the really good or even just decent grifter nonprofits. Grifting aside, I still think that BLM is unfortunately too divisive - it stokes racial tension. Of course, Martin Luther King did the same, as did Malcolm X; the difference here is that they managed to effect lasting societal change and had a clear endgame. They also referenced the shared humanity of Black people, rather than painting police brutality as an issue that only or mostly affects Black people...yes, there IS some disproportionate impact. Yes, there IS bias, it's very real, some of it is due to cops being pigs and some of it is due to the vicious cycles that stereotypes enable. On the other hand, I think that painting it as being just a "black problem" is the wrong tactic to take as it stokes racial and political tension in order to resolve a black issue rather than a human issue...I've heard that cops in redneck rural areas are just as much of assholes as cops in the 'hood. It'd be nice if BLM was able to join forces with rednecks against police brutality. Maybe they could find themselves some sympathetic white Boy Scout that got gunned down by asshole cops or something.

Maybe they could find themselves some sympathetic white Boy Scout that got gunned down by asshole cops or something.

They won't, because police incompetence on that level is actually quite rare. There will be plenty of sympathetic white Boy Scouts that were merely harassed by cops, maybe even roughed up a little, but approximately zero that were actually shot for no reason at all. This is the same pattern that emerges with black people in cities - many have stories of being pointlessly harassed for no good reason and many of these stories are true, fewer have stories of being roughed up for no good reason and some of these are true, but basically no one just gets shot while they're minding their own business.

There have been a number of incidents of police misuse of force in the last few years that have largely dropped out of the public eye. Admittedly not of white Boy Scouts, but not necessarily obvious villains either. There was a couple shot in Houston (the Harding Street Raid in 2019) on what turned out to be a falsified no-knock warrant, or the 2015 biker shootout in Waco that ultimately saw all charges dropped, despite nine deaths (IMO most likely that the police started the shooting). I'm sure there are other examples.

Wasnt there that white kid who was also kneeled on, died, and then the cops were aquitted? Had an alliterative name, i think.

Tony Timpa. Somewhat similar story, crazy guy that the cops were trying to subdue, they did it too roughly and behaved callously. He died. It's pretty terrible and I think they should face justice (as I thought Floyd's killer should have).

Yeah. You've got Daniel Shaver's death; he pointed something that looked like a real rifle out of a hotel window, then got shot by a trigger-happy incompetent asshole cop. Same thing's true for police harassment. Maybe in our fathers' or grandfathers' time there were drop guns and people being shot in the back for running from cops. It might still happen now, but not all that often and if it does the police departments are at least competent in covering this up. Asshole cops can definitely make people very clumsy indeed because they "look like criminals" or something like that. Sometimes the cops are beating up people they really think are criminals but can't prove anything.

basically no one just gets shot while they're minding their own business

Counterpoint: swat teams raiding the wrong address and killing the residents. Which from my memories of reading Reason years ago is a somewhat regular occurrence.

Counterpoint: swat teams raiding the wrong address and killing the residents. Which from my memories of reading Reason years ago is a somewhat regular occurrence.

Link, for the curious. There are other swat-related articles in there, but many are about bad warrants of one form or another.

Adding to the list, there's Robert Ethan Saylor, who had Down's syndrome and suffocated after being forcibly restrained by authorities. His crime was slipping back into a theatre to watch the same movie twice. A pretty similar situation to George Floyd, except one was a career criminal on meth, and one was mentally disabled. But we know which one got the national outrage. (To be clear, both just seem like unfortunate, preventable-in-hindsight accidents to me. It's just the hypocrisy that I hate.)

Robert Dotson would have a bone to pick with you, but for certain reasons his widow would have to do it for him. And it's not like this is new : Ken Ballew managed to be a short-lived cause celebre among a certain type of gun owner, but Andrew Scott's a good intermediate version that you've never heard of.

Duncan Lemp was floating around the same time that George Floyd was, and tbf he was a bit of a paranoid nutcase (though there is a fun question of whether he was paranoid enough), but so were a number of BLM high-profile examples.

Most ideological shifts I've seen - to any direction - have worked by someone first radically changing their views on some particular issue, for whatever reason, which then creates contradictions with their other views, with those contradictions then being dialectically slowly worked through until they lead to other view changes. However, that rarely happens in an instant, and the process might always not be particularly clear (and generally doesn't lead to a complete 180 shift in views). You wouldn't expect it to happen in an instant or for the same way for everyone, and you would probably not witness the results at a societal level expect in retrospect.

A lot of right-wingers seem to simultaneously believe that the right-wing ideals are obviously logically more correct and obvious than left-wing ones, yet are also suspicious that left-wingers would ever actually shed their views due dramatical events, unless it's the instant rare complete "Road to Damascus" conversion to a right-wing cause (which would probably come off as suspicious and opportunistic to me). That's even though we have a well-known historical process to compare to - the slow delegitimization of pro-Soviet Communism, and Communism in general, in the West, and the associated general loss of credibility for state socialism and the general acceptance of (regulated) market economy by almost all corners of Western political thought.

One facet of the edifice falling does not cause questioning of the whole structure; rather, the internalised rationalisation is "wow, those guys were REALLY GOOD at concealing how shitty they were" and not "wow, I really blinded myself to how obviously shitty those guys are".

My first thought when reading the start of this sentence was that this reminds me of the Internet or the Titanic, in the way it has protections against the whole thing catastrophically going down just from one major part going down (the Titanic itself obviously went down, due to more compartments getting breached than it was designed for, but the principle stands). And in the realm of the self-proclaimed progressive left or the "woke" or the SocJus or the like, I think one of the strongest forms of protection it has is its outright rejection of logic, reasoning, and empirical evidence as tools to learn true things about the world as concepts invented by oppressors in order to oppress. By freeing themselves from the constraints of logic, they can observe one part of their ideology getting utterly crushed and then completely ignore that the very same thing that crushed one part will also crush other parts.

Combine that with plain old Gell-Mann Amnesia, and yeah, I think predictions of any sort of "vibe shift" are hugely premature at this point. I mean, it's not out of the question, but I feel like I've observed these sorts of "pre-vibe-shift" signs dozens of times in the past decade, and I'm not sure I can recall it ever leading to anything other than doubling down.

Vibe shift?

I've thought, several times, certainly this will be the vibe shift. And every time, somehow, normies go back to sleep. Some comforting narrative Xanax get's cooked up and shipped out.

I thought surely, the naked insanity on college campuses, that may have peeked with Evergreen and Bret Weinstein, will cause a vibe shift. And maybe a few people on the edges woke up, but most people went back to sleep with tales that it wasn't so bad, and also they deserved it.

I thought the nightly footage of BLM/Antifa burning down cities, sieging a federal courthouse, and occupying and then murdering people in CHAZ/CHOP would wake people up. And once again, a few did. Then Jan 6th happened and most people went back to sleep. They were told that was worse than all of the above combined, and they slept soundly.

I thought the government taking away people's children, sterilizing and mutilating them would surely wake people up. But if my in-laws are any indicator, it's a crime against humanity so horrifying to contemplate, and so mired in euphemisms like "trans health care for children", that they literally think it's impossible that doctors could be operating on children as young as 13, or prescribing permanently altering drugs to prepubescents. They think my wife and I are making it all up.

The iconic scene from the Unite the Right rally of "Jews will not replace us" is being repeated by diverse crowds in every major city in America in support of Hamas. If the handful of losers in Charlottesville, dwarfed by the counterprotest, were hung around Trump's neck for 4 years and considered the most significant threat to America, what do we make of the current explicit shows of support for Hamas' terrorism and antisemitism from the radical left that dwarf Unite the Right by several orders of magnitude?

I'd like to think people will wake up. But I've thought that before. It's impossible. They'll just tune into MSNBC, fiending for more narrative Xanax. They'll be told to stay off Twitter, everything you see there is misinformation. It's not so bad. Also the Republicans are still worse. The ADL says so, and they'd know. They're the authority on antisemitism after all. Just goto sleep.

the naked insanity on college campuses, that may have peeked with Evergreen and Bret Weinstein

Peeking and naked insanity? Sounds more like Harvey Weinstein.

Anyway, I don't think that this is a huge disastrous moment for wokery or anything like that, but things like perceptions of antisemitism on the left can make a difference. It was one of the things that hurt UK Labour in the latter Jeremy Corbyn years, culminating in Corbyn being successfully persecuted by the centre left and UK Labour in general doing a massive turnaround in many ways within several years, with a lot of Blairism and Blairites being rehabilitated.

In the US, where Islam and pro-Palestinian sentiment are less important on the left, I don't see the Hamas attacks having as much significance. At most, elements of the far left will acquire a lower reputation among everyday Obama-loving Democrats.

Another round of naive techno-optimism :

I ran across this interesting tidbit from Los Angeles news : the March 2024 ballot includes a proposed Responsible Hotel Ordnance to provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room. The pro and anti reactions you'd expect are in full swing, with the unexpect-to-me wrinkle that the hotel worker's union organized the petition campaign. Bill text here, courtesy of LA city clerk. There's some historical context here in that Project Roomkey was (is?) a COVID-era initiative to rent idle rooms from hotels and motels during the pandemic downturn and use them to house homeless people, under the reasoning that this would reduce the risk of transmission among the homeless population by controlling their living conditions and reducing contact rates.

I mention this only to set context for my actual topic: for purposes of high-density commie-block-style housing of the feral, incompetent, and non-economically viable, how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant? Online discussion points out the inevitability of a lawsuit after someone trashes their residence in a fit of, uh, exuberance, and the comparisons to open-air prisons write themselves, but I'm interested in the actual engineering challenges of building an individual space so well that a tenant can't render it unfit for use, modulo bleach, power-cleaning, and replacing some Ikea furniture. I figure the key is to keep the interior of the room entirely sacrificial, and to have the room's border act as a firebreak for damages, so that even if the occupants render everything inside into unusable scrap, it doesn't propagate to your service trunks in the hallway. What's this cost? What are the regulatory hurdles? Who's solved this before, and how well?

Just chiming in with the usual reminder that what desperate people look and act like after decades of neglect and deprivation is not a very useful indicator of what they would look like had they been receiving aid and care that entire time instead.

Which is to say: yes, many people living on the street are now destructive and oppositional, making it difficult to treat and assist them in the short-term. But that's not an indication that there's some percent of the population that's genetically and inevitably incapable of not destroying everything around them, it's the result of what they've suffered under our system, and the self-medicating they've done to live through it.

A comprehensive system of social welfare that didn't let anyone fall through the cracks to begin with would prevent most of them from getting to that point, making schemes like this much more practical and useful.

It seems very unlikely the people of Los Angeles will vote for this given popular sentiment has now turned thoroughly against the homeless.

SF voted to ban homeless tents on streets years ago, a judge stepped in and forced them to allow it.

These sort of things aren't decided democratically in California. The bill will fail but then a left wing group will get a friendly judge to mandate it's major points.

There's a specific ruling for the 9th circuit where you can relocate the homeless, but only if you have a place to relocate them to, which SF didn't. (And regardless of whether that's a good ruling, if you don't have a place to put homeless people you're probably not really getting rid of tent cities, just moving them around.) AFAIK there's no similar law/ruling that would apply to the above situation, though IANAL.

To be more precise about that ruling, SF didn't have to merely have a place for an individual person to move to, but places for the entire estimated homeless population. I.e. it could have a space open for someone, but unless it had spaces open for every homeless person on the streets that night, it wasn't allowed to force that individual to move his tent. Given that many homeless refuse any offer of shelter, the ruling requires SF to have a substantial overcapacity of shelter beds before doing anything.

Gotcha, thanks for the added context.

I am curious: the hotel workers' union organized the petition, but I have a hard time imagining it originates from the rank and file. Hotels would presumably have to hire significantly more staff to handle this, but 1) existing workers would have to deal with homeless people and 2) it would almost certainly reduce the proportion of their work that results in tips. If you're an existing worker, what's the advantage here?

Hotels would presumably have to hire significantly more staff to handle this

This is really more than an aside. More work for their members seems like a pretty slam dunk argument for a union supporting a ballot initiative. See in a different vein;

Hotel industry spokespeople have said they believe the ballot measure is a negotiating tactic by the union, which is currently on a rolling strike against unionized hotels in Los Angeles.

The workers union organized the petition against the vouchers, surely.

Not so, source. Seems like it's a pressure tactic from the unions:

Earlier this month, a bargaining group representing hotel owners filed unfair labor practice charges against Unite Here Local 11 with the National Labor Relations Board. According to the complaint, the hotel workers’ union is demanding that the hotels support the Responsible Hotel Ordinance.

And there’s more.

The hotel owners say the union is also demanding a 7% tax on guests of unionized hotels, which a union official said could fund affordable housing for hotel workers.

Technically, unions can’t bargain with hotels for a tax increase. What they’re probably doing is trying to strongarm the hotels into backing, or not opposing, a new initiative for a tax increase. That would probably cross the line into an unfair labor practice.

The hotel owners say the union is also demanding a 7% tax on guests of unionized hotels

Ok, I nearly thought I understood, but now I'm confused again. If my union was campaigning to impose a special tax on unionized businesses where I work, then I would leave the union. Is the idea that guests will still use unionized hotels even with this tax increase?

To the extent this is thought through at all, the idea seems to be that the tax would be set aside to give housing subsidies to hotel workers, with an implicit assumption that demand for unionized hotels is highly inelastic.

Ah, thanks.

Assuming that monetary incentives won't make a significant difference to behaviour seems to be the first principle of left-wing economics, much of the time.

I'm seeing speculation that it's leverage in a labor dispute. Since the union brought the proposal, they can withdraw it at will. Therefore the hotels should accede to their demands or the hotels will risk the proposal getting put to a popular vote.

Apparently union construction labor is known to bring lawsuits against projects that don't use them, in the same vein.

If the union in question is SEIU, then "calculated dick move" is a racing certainty. If any other union, I would take the over on "maggot extremists on the paid staff acting without meaningful membership supervision".

In a world where AirBnB is even marginally legal it wouldn't reduce their work resulting in tips, it would eliminate it entirely. Over time the average hotel aims for a 60% occupancy rate assumption, maybe it's higher in LA so call it 80%, that's a huge number of rooms going to the homeless every night. And given that it's impossible to know which rooms won't be booked or when, that means mingling in the lobby and the elevator with the homeless, it means that I'm probably getting one of those indestructible concrete rooms.

Getting a hotel room is already often a tough sell over an Airbnb cost wise, throw this ordinance in and unless they entirely ban Airbnb and any other kind of system, Airbnb will dominate. I don't hugely object to sharing public space with the homeless, but I'm going to prefer paying for private spaces where I don't when I'm traveling. No hotel nicer than a motel 6 can possibly survive this.

Yeah. If I'm a hotel owner, this is pretty bad, but I can in theory just get a perpetual income stream of "market rate" vouchers from the city. Workers are just screwed. If owners have any moral obligations at all toward their workers, they need to fight this as much as possible. Preferably with a bunch of commercials featuring rank and file workers talking about how bad it will be for them, with little to no reference about how it affects hotels as an industry.

Oh, no, it will absolutely destroy the hotel industry if any alternative exists for any hotel nicer than a roadside drunk-tank.

Why would I choose to stay in a nice hotel if I share the space with homeless derelicts? If I walk out to get ice for my drinks and have to be leered at by various vagabonds? If I have to worry about my car being vandalized in the parking lot by my fellow guests.

When I could just stay at an AirBnB that is a similar cost and doesn't have a homeless person next door? Or, if I'm a tourist, why would I travel to the town where my hotel will be part homeless shelter when I could travel to literally anywhere else?

Airbnb not necessary, you can just get a hotel room outside city limits.

Especially in LA, which has tons of other municipalities embedded within it.

I didn't even consider it from the perspective of the paying hotel guests.

If I was confronted with a hotel where 40% of the guests were homeless, then believe me I'm cutting out the middle man and pitching a tent myself, in terms of proportions, there are fewer of them on the streets.

Now consider it from the perspective of a hotel guest with a wife or even worse a child. You going to be comfortable with them going down the hall to grab some ice or a soda? You going to let them run down to the front desk to buy a snack or even turn the corner ahead of you?

What happens when in the inevitable inability to effectively empty and clean full hotel every night, with a large percentage of unruly and mentally ill guests, a cleaning woman misses something and your kid steps on a needle walking around the room barefoot or jumping onto the bed?

What happens when someone's girlfriend gets raped in a stairwell

What happens when a toddler finds some candy that fell on the floor or in a corner and puts in in thier mouth before you can stop them, but whoopsie! it's** fentanyl and now their dead!**

None. Your union boss is a liberal activist and he is responsible for it. He will never have to clean shit out of sheets for minimum wage.

Maybe you sign it because you're supposed to, but you, as a hotel worker, have no skin in the game. It's just a job - and a crappy one at that. You'll flee for greener pastures the second the obvious consequences of this bill become apparent.

I haven't seen @grendel-khan here in a while, so I'll chime in and say that the problem is the lack of housing, as usual. And so, instead of working to fix the housing problem by building more, LA wants to tackle it with a bizarre solution guaranteed to generate Culture War heat (granted, not that a fight against NIMBYs would be any less hot, but even so).

You can get prison-style furniture and toilets and whatever that are relatively resistant to trashing. Not trashing-proof, some asshole might try and burn through your rock-solid prison toilet with homemade thermite or something. However, one of the issues that comes to mind is flooding, either deliberately or through drug-fueled incompetence or just idiocy. How do you deal with assholes blocking the drains in your units and getting the water running? Maybe you can have some kind of shutoff meter or something, but those can be defeated and even IDK 10 gallons of water just sitting in a unit is a lot and can cause mold and other damage.

Prisons have guards that walk by and see if an inmate is flooding his cell with toilet water or some shit like that, and they put a stop to it reasonably quickly - within hours, I think, but I'm no corrections officer.

Smart thing would be to have each unit have a concrete waterproof curb around the perimeter and multiple drains throughout. Preferably some large drains such that blocking them would be an actual challenge.

You have people with privacy and tools. If they have a grudge against you, they could very well remove the grates and seal the drain with contractor bags stuffed full of rags or something. You also have toilets and plumbing. Flushing a bunch of old T-shirts down the toilet and chasing it with something like rancid fat or concrete can block pipes pretty badly. Any halfway determined asshole with access to the entire contents of a goddamn hardware store can create a pretty damn bad clog with $20 worth of goods from the local hardware store plus or minus commonly available scavenged or stolen items like trash bags, old fryer oil, paint/glue/adhesives, or something else.

I suppose that you could just use a Singapore-style solution where you beat or flog people for damaging the hell out of the apartment and then maybe boot them out, and the hobos that can live in apartments without royally fucking it up get to live there.

Also how do you deal with these guys deciding to cook meth or something in the apartments? IDK - maybe you just do the same thing as you do to the guy that floods the place.

If you let angry prisoners get $20 worth of goods from the local Home Depot and a whole week unsupervised, they could probably burn down the prison.

If they have a grudge against you

Oh, yeah. The homeless aren't a monolithic block, there are a lot of degrees and shades of difference. There's the people who are just temporarily homeless and still have it together enough that if they get support, they get back on the ladder of normal society, there are the unfortunates who are mentally disturbed or mentally ill in some degree, there are the people fucked up by alcohol/drugs, there are the people who lost jobs/got divorced/got sick and their lives fell apart bit by bit to where they're homeless, there are the criminals and so on. And the kind of grifters who do want to milk the system will indeed have grudges if they're not getting everything they want and perceive that they are owed. So if they steal shit, sell it, and want it replaced (often by better stuff) and you don't comply - they have no problem doing the likes of the above.

You have people with privacy and tools.

This is the problem in a nutshell. In prisons, there is monitoring with cctv cameras and physical patrols.

If people aren't in custody under mental health laws or under criminal arrest, then you must allow them privacy. You can't deny them tools like cutlery, lighters, crowbars, sheets, kerosene and all sorts of other mundane items denied to prisoners.

You can build a room that is vandal resistant and will hold out against limited tools for the time it takes for the custodians to respond. You can't build a room where people with unlimited tools and time can maliciously or negligently work towards the room's destruction (or even the entire building).

To even build a vandal resistant room would make it unsuitable for use by paying customers. You either cater the facility to housing the homeless, or you acknowledge that designing the rooms this way will not make them viable for generating income from paying hotel guests.

Yeah. There's definitely a use case for a shit tier hotel room like this but I wouldn't want to be around a bunch of people that can't even live in an apartment...it seems like it would be safer for me to just camp in the woods or something.

Or you discriminate against those who get vouchers for hotel accommodation to be the people who aren't crazy, criminal, or addicted enough that they'll get roaring drunk/high and smash shit up (getting quietly blotto and just passing out in bed is another matter).

And if you do that, and leave the hardcore on the streets, then you the city will be facing lawsuits out the wazoo from every activist do-gooder and 'homelessness industrial complex' out there. How dare you make it so that Crazy Joe who would steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes, deals drugs, and beats and terrorises the shit out of his fellow homeless, can't get a hotel room beside normal people!

how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant?

Ask the Department of Corrections. Such rooms tend to be all hard surfaces (cinder block and concrete) with stainless-steel appliances (by which I mean this, not this). Even then, they need to make sure the occupants don't have any tools.

Even then, they need to make sure the occupants don't have any tools.

Yeah. Preventing potentially hostile people from destroying these things is a system; not only are there tough, destruction-resistant fixtures but there is also a lot more restriction on tools and equipment and guards or orderlies surveilling the place and checking in on people to make sure they're not flooding the place with toilet water.

Flooding is the weak point, because homeless people don’t hold on to many tools- anything beyond ‘lighter, Swiss Army knife, maybe a screwdriver’ gets pawned. You could fix that with redundant drains and shutoffs for every room, I guess. These aren’t evil geniuses, they’re drug addicts with borderline mental retardation.

Still seems like it would be better not to do this.

Combination Toilet, Suicide Resistant

Worst toilet I've used

Submitted 4 months ago

By Trash man

From Wayne County jail

It's no fun when your the one in the holding cell sharing this terrible toilet with 40 other people. Washing your face with toilet water is barbaric

Bottom Line No, I would not recommend to a friend

Hilarious. Thanks for the link.

The government forcing private businesses to fix their screw ups is so obviously morally wrong.. Plus this will obviously not work. A bad event will happen and this will go away. It blows my mind people still propose these kinds of solutions.

I have some experience with building services security engineering and design, including for specialised correctional facilities.

how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant

Not difficult, but the rooms would not be comfortable. You are looking at various design elements used in detention and forensic mental health facilities. No carpet, but lanolin flooring with drainage in each room. Vandal resistant paint. Plastic furniture like you've suggested. Potentially anti-ligature fixtures and fittings. Basically you'd be able to (and need to be able to) high pressure hose the place out. I would start with a basic expectation that people will smear shit on the walls and roof and potentially start a fire on the floor and go from there.

It would be unjust to get private citizens or companies to fund this type of housing out of their own pockets.

I would start with a basic expectation that people will smear shit on the walls and roof and potentially start a fire on the floor and go from there.

Unhappily, yeah. And that's only the people who are mentally unable to live independently, not the malicious fucks who love to destroy things just because (and then complain that they're not getting replacements and upgrades and how it's unfair and they're being discriminated against).

Do the vouchers at least insure the hotel against damage and lost revenue if the room is trashed? If they just cover the cost of a single night at some government rate, no hotel will accept a voucher like that, ever.

how difficult is it to build rooms that can't be damaged beyond repair by an adversarial occupant

Not that difficult, it's called a prison cell.

Not even just damage what if the homeless person rapes people or robs them or steals stuff out of rooms?

Infests it with bedbugs, contaminates it with a diy meth lab, etc, etc.

Prison cells are also supported by guards, unlike apartments. Can't bring a sledgehammer into a prison cell.

There used to be cheap, minimal lodgings for those who would otherwise be homeless; they were called flophouses.

The point there, though, is that the people using them were at least trying to work and make some kind of money. They catered to transients and the poorest working class, not the homeless as we know the term now.

And the problem is not "get the guy off the street by giving him a (temporary) room in a hotel, problem solved". For the homeless who are "down on my luck, living in my car/couch surfing, otherwise trying to get my life back together", sure, this would help. If what they basically need is a bed to sleep in, a way to wash themselves, and some means of cooking basic meals or finding cheap meals while they look for work/help/have work just need to find somewhere to live, that's enough.

But the really hardcore homeless, the people who don't want to go to shelters where they are allowed to drink and take drugs, the criminals, the mentally ill - this won't do a damn thing. Even having to talk about making the rooms destruction-proof demonstrates this. You'll have people who cannot live independently because they can't take care of themselves and will clog the toilets by trying to flush rubbish down it, you'll have people who are criminals and will steal for sale anything not nailed down, and you'll have the crazy/malicious types who wreck shit just for the sake of it.

Unless you're going to discriminate between the "just need transient accommodation" and the hardcore types, this won't work. The hardcore need supervision, support, social workers, counselling, and someone calling in at a minimum once a week to check on them and make sure they aren't neglecting to eat or endangering themselves by trying to light fires in the middle of the room.

Hotels won't like or want that kind of hassle, and who can blame them? They're not set up to be asylums or halfway houses. Regular guests won't want to be staying in rooms besides the crazy and criminal. And that kind of intensive support is so expensive that the city won't/can't pay for it.

So the bill may be passed, all will congratulate themselves that they're Tackling The Problem, and it'll end up worse than ever.

At best, you'll get a new version of flophouses where dilapidated properties are turned into tiny 'rooms' with no facilities and the vouchers are going to pay what, in effect, will be a slum lord. Maybe that's better than nothing, but it's not a lasting solution.

But probably this is indeed a cynical bargaining tool by the union: give in to us on this particular demand, or we'll flood your premises with the feral and nobody sane will ever want to stay in your hotel again and you'll go broke.

provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room

New startup idea: uber for staying in hotel rooms, where hotels pay background-checked people to stay in hotel rooms to prevent them from being vacant.

If it means cheaper or even free hotel rooms for the likes of me, I don't think I'd mind at all, although you'd probably get a bunch of them shutting down as it's no longer profitable for them to pay to keep rooms full, and letting them go empty is even worse. Long term almost certainly a net negative for society, but you can apply that label to so so many modern government programmes.

but I'm interested in the actual engineering challenges of building an individual space so well that a tenant can't render it unfit for use, modulo bleach, power-cleaning, and replacing some Ikea furniture

That depends on the tenant. These are homeless people, so generally not long term planners(who can wear through anything) or possessing tool collections(they’d pawn them for drug money). But they do have small items- lighters, knives, etc.

Now Sheetrock is delicate, but you don’t need it. Bare, polished(a rough surface can itself be used to damage things) concrete with electrical/plumbing access routed through stainless steel conduit. You’re probably going to want to seal everything; liquids can do a lot of damage. Obviously, you don’t have built in furniture, or if you do it’s the same concrete and stainless. That means you need to worry about the other furniture being used to smash things up, so it’s flimsy ikea. You can’t harden windows, so they’re right out.

Also, the doors have to be decent and locking, because I’m assume you’re hosting multiple homeless people in this facility and letting them run away instead of fight is probably a necessity.

Congrats, you’ve invented the prison cell.

You can’t harden windows, so they’re right out.

Bars or grates could be used over the windows; they could be made out of Lexan or something, too.

Even so, the biggest problem here seems to be good old fashioned flooding, either through malice or gross incompetence.

Even so, the biggest problem here seems to be good old fashioned flooding, either through malice or gross incompetence.

No ensuite bathrooms is the answer. If you want to use the bathroom, just go to the shared one that is supervised. Actually, the most malicious customers would just piss on the floor and smear everything with their feces.

I mean these things are designed to be able to be cleaned by a guy hosing the place down with a power washer. Shitting all over the place isn't as bad as flooding it or cooking meth in it.

Bars or grates could be used over the windows

Pretty sure that's illegal. That's a fire safety violation. "But concrete doesn't burn." Fire code doesn't care.

Concrete may not burn, but lots of other things do. You might get away with "can only open the window a limited amount so people can't commit suicide by flinging themselves out the window" but bars/grates like that, very probably not.

This is such an extremely poorly-thought-out idea that it's kind of hilarious.

The obvious problem is that any kind of substantial homeless presence in hotels would have such a negative impact on business that hotels would go to great lengths to avoid it. Perhaps they would follow some of the suggestions listed in other comments and sell hotel rooms at bargain prices to people who are flexible in their booking (e.g. booking day of, or willing to move around their booking) or even gift some guests an extra room or two. More simply, they could gift employees free rooms whenever there's a vacancy. It's also possible that most hotels in LA proper would simply close and relocate to cities in the LA area which wouldn't be affected by this law (there are many other municipalities essentially embedded in the city of LA).

But after thinking about it a bit, I think an even bigger problem is something pointed out in the article: the number of vacant rooms in a hotel can change unpredictably from day-to-day so you either have to constantly kick out homeless residents on short notice or essentially accept a permanent fraction of your rooms being used to house the homeless. Even worse, if you opt for the latter then every time there's a dip in your number of regular customers, you risk having to increase the "permanent homeless" fraction of rooms. And if you opt for the former option then you will constantly have to get into fights with homeless people who don't want to leave and risk a huge public relations disaster if that ever goes poorly. Not to mention it would be insanely disruptive to regular customers.

I think the hypothesis mentioned in the article—that this is a negotiating tactic by the hotel workers' union—makes a lot of sense. Basically it is a threat against hotel owners that if they don't increase salaries then they will be put out of business by an insane law. If this is really the union's strategy then it seems a bit risky. There is always a chance that even the law will take on a life of its own and get passed even if negotiations succeed and salaries are raised. And then everyone (hotel owners and workers alike) will be out of a job.

And if you opt for the former option then you will constantly have to get into fights with homeless people who don't want to leave and risk a huge public relations disaster if that ever goes poorly.

In practice I suspect hotels would call the cops to remove them, and just deal with it if they don’t show up. Employees would then be gifted that room in perpetuity unless someone tried to reserve it.

I thought we (or rather the enlightened ones) were doing away with police and replacing them with social workers or mediation teams?

Having cops constantly going to your hotel also sounds disastrous for business. I agree that hotels would do a lot of things to try to keep rooms from going empty, including gifting all excess rooms to employees each night, if allowed. A lot would depend on what enforcement looked like I guess.

I think the union, as the sponsor, is allowed to unilaterally withdraw the proposition. Though someone else could propose it if it truly took off, they'd have to go through the efforts of getting signatures etc.

It would be interesting to see what chaos arose if it did somehow pass.

I think the union, as the sponsor, is allowed to unilaterally withdraw the proposition.

Interesting, I didn't notice that part. Even taking this into account, it still seems a bit dangerous: if the union hasn't reached a deal with hotel management by the deadline to withdraw the proposition then they need to either reveal their threat to be an empty one or go through with it, in which case it could well pass.

I generally am pretty open to unions and employers playing hardball with each other. The reason this sticks in my craw a bit is that, if it is a cynical maneuver, it's transparently an empty one: the union won't pull the trigger on it because it hurts workers at least as much as the employers, so it gives no actual leverage.

I guess the ambiguity of whether it's cynical or borne of genuine progressive beliefs does give it some edge, though.

Depends on the relative mobility. In many unlearned/non-specialized professions, anything that blows up the entire profession gives leverage to the workers over the employers, since the workers will just move to a different profession with minimal friction, while the employers will need to accept large losses if they want to switch to anything else. Though I guess it's still an odd move for the unions in particular, since the union itself also has a lot more to lose.

Who counts as homeless in America? In Ireland putting homeless people up in hotels is the standard thing to do but I haven't seen any news of hotels complaining about business being affected by an intake of rough sleepers and drug addicts. Add refugee accomodation and it's very lucrative and a much more stable source of income for a hotel owner or landlord than serving the market.

This is very interesting and thanks for bringing it up! Do you know a place where I can read the details about this program? Everything I was able to quickly find (e.g. this article) talks about "homeless families" being provided accommodations in hotels in Dublin. Depending on what homeless families means, this might be quite different from the most visible segment of the homeless population in LA, which seems to consist of single people with no children present. This makes me wonder if there is some screening that goes into who is eligible for the program in Ireland or if the homeless population in Ireland is just significantly different from the homeless population in LA. Also, I believe the rate of opiod abuse is much lower in Ireland, which might make a big difference.

That kind of temporary accommodation is paid for by local councils/homelessness services and is generally because the shelters and other places are full to the brim and can't take any new entrants. It's for families and is meant to be short-term emergency accommodation, not rough sleepers and "people with complex needs". Councils don't like having to fall back on it because it costs money and isn't a permanent solution, but if you don't have beds or spaces and you have, say, a woman with three kids who otherwise is going to be on the street - well, there's not much choice.

A lot of hotels also took on refugee/asylum seekers in Direct Provision. Usual sort of complaints about this, from the people in that accommodation to the locals; general perception (unfair or not) is that the hoteliers were making profit at the expense of the community.

I don't know if the Californian proposal does mean the rough sleepers etc., it sounds like it (because if they're going to discriminate amongst the homeless based on 'are they normal or not?' I can imagine seventeen different lawsuits from seventeen different NGOs and activist groups about that).

Report for July 2023 here, it seems to be a mess to download but that's the government websites for ya!

In relation to the terms used in the report for the accommodation types see explanation below: PEA - Private Emergency Accommodation: this may include hotels, B&Bs and other residential facilities that are used on an emergency basis. Supports are provided to services users on a visiting supports basis. STA - Supported Temporary Accommodation: accommodation, including family hubs, hostels, with onsite professional support. TEA - Temporary Emergency Accommodation: emergency accommodation with no (or minimal) support.

Irish homeless numbers are way smaller than California; the latest data is as follows:

The number of people accessing State-funded emergency accommodation as of August 2023 is 12,691, according to figures published by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

This figure does not include people sleeping rough, people couch surfing, homeless people in hospitals and prisons, those in Direct provision centres, and homeless households in Domestic Violence refugees. These people are not included in the regular monthly homeless figures as they are not accessing emergency homeless accommodation funded through Section 10 of the Housing Act.

By comparison, the numbers for Los Angeles (where this bill is proposed) alone, for June 2023:

The 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count results were released today, showing a 9% rise in homelessness on any given night in Los Angeles County to an estimated 75,518 people and a 10% rise in the City of Los Angeles to an estimated 46,260 people.

sell hotel rooms at bargain prices to people who are flexible in their booking

Special off-peak booking! Bargain prices! Stay three days for the price of two! kinds of promotions. If the choice is between "take a cut on pricing to get the rooms occupied by normal people" and "be forced to accept government vouchers for the homeless", then any sensible decision is going to be "cut the prices".

If the voucher scheme was for a filtered set of applicants (i.e. people temporarily needing accommodation who are not crazy, druggies, or criminals) then it might work for a while. But if it's "take anybody we send with no discretion", it never will get off the ground because a hotel is not set up to be a supervised living support system.

Prediction: If this passes nice hotels will almost never have vacancies. They will have some rewards program that guarantees there are never vacancies because any empty room will be given to a person in the rewards program or perhaps given to a friend of a hotel employee. Or, you go to the hotel expecting to have one room, and the hotel decides to give you two as a bonus for being such a good customer.

It really is striking that people that propose these sorts of things seem fundamentally incapable of arriving at this simple level of second order thinking. Problem with people on the streets? Well, give them hotel rooms, simple as! If confronted with fairly obvious workarounds like this, the answer would be to litigate against the hotels, of course.


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