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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   21285 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck this fucking toilet hole of a planet.

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

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

(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.

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.

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".

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?

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.

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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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

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

I believe that's Singapore.

Somalia is surely a better example?

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

I 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On ruling well as a substitute for morality

Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif was an Alawite King of Morocco who ruled from 1672 to 1727. As a minor son of the first king of the Alawite dynasty and with his mother being a black slave, he only managed to ascend to power due to a fortuitous series of events where two of his higher ranking half brothers took the throne in succession, quarreling against each other until one of them was killed by forces of the other, and then the other died in a horse accident during a campaign a few years later. Even then, he only really got his hands on power because he managed to make it to Fez and proclaim himself Sultan before any of the other people who could conceivably lay a claim to the throne managed to do it.

As you would expect, his reign started out with a very divided Morocco. A rival claimant to the throne rushed to Marrakesh and had himself proclaimed Sultan. Moulay Ismail had to defeat him multiple times over many years because like a goblin, as soon as the Sultan’s forces went to a city to subdue his revolt he would disappear from there and reappear soon after in a different city where he would agitate the nobles there to rebel against the sultan.

Eventually Moulay Ismail managed to subjugate all the pretenders and unify Morocco as a single state under him as the undisputed king. This led to a period of relative stability where the median inhabitants of the empire could by and large go about their lives in peace. His army reforms also led to the creation of the first professional Moroccan Army, the Black Guards, who owed their loyalty directly to the Moroccan state (and by extension to Moulay Ismail) rather than being a collection of fighters from disparate tribes.

He also invested heavily in building structures, creating over 75 forts over his reign all over Morocco. Not only this, he was also a great lover of nature and created a multitude of gardens in the deserts of western north Africa. He basically built the city of Meknes as a new capital for Morocco, raising it from a few derelict villages to such a splendor that it is now recognised as one of the four Imperial Cities of Morocco. To this day his constructions are some of the most noteworthy landmarks any tourist could visit in the country.

And not just this, but what man can overlook his personal harem of over 500 women, through which he sired over 800 confirmed children, putting him as the second most prolific confirmed father throughout all of history, seconded only by Genghis Khan. He was also quite active in the diplomatic arena, sending letters and ambassadors as far as Great Britain to the court of James II, at one point extorting him to convert to Islam for his own spiritual benefit.

His reign is by and large seen as a golden age for Morocco. He brought order and security to the empire, and his reign was described by the historian Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nasiri as:

“The evildoers and troublemakers no longer knew where to shelter, where to seek refuge: no land wanted to bear them, no sky would cover them.”

He was often compared to his contemporary, Louis XIV of France with whom he had an alliance and was considered to be the Moroccan Sun King (at one point he even tried to get married to one of the illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV). He had grown Morocco to its largest size ever and not only this, the empire’s economy was also doing well. His rule was a high water mark for Morocco: after his death his multitude of sons had another big power struggle which had the dubious distinction of having a single person, Moulay Abdallah, become Sultan on six separate occasions.

Regardless, it is clear that an ordinary citizen of Morocco would have had a far better life during the reign of Moulay Ismail than either the time before his Sultanate or after it. A comparison can be made here to the Three Kingdoms period of Imperial China between the Han and Jin dynasties when due to strife and extensive bloody competition between small warring polities China lost half of its population in merely 60 years. In many ways the reign of Moulay Ismail was the inverse of this, Morocco thrived and flourished during his almost 60 years on the throne.

One might wonder why such an accomplished king and ruler is so unknown these days, why the name of Moulay Ismail is not mentioned more widely in discourse. Even amongst the well read who know something about the history of Africa the name “Moulay Ismail” is not likely to raise too many eyebrows in recognition. This is because despite all the general prosperity and welfare generated by his half century rule over Morocco, his behavior in his personal life and dealings was very much the opposite, indeed Moulay Ismail is better known to people these days as Ismail the bloodthirsty.

His atrocities were myriad, his actions so extreme that even his contemporaries of the 17th century questioned them. A french captive described his appearance as thus:

He is a vigorous man, well-built, quite tall but rather slender... his face is a clear brown colour, rather long, and its features are all quite well-formed. He has a long beard that is slightly forked. His expression, which seems quite soft, is not a sign of his humanity - on the contrary, he is very cruel...

Estimates vary, but point to him having killed or ordered the deaths of over 50,000 people during his reign (not including losses in battle). He was exceptionally cruel to his personal slaves. One of his favorite pastimes when out riding was to pull out his sword as he was climbing his horse and decapitate the slave who was holding the stirrup. Why? Because he could. Ismail the bloodthirsty needed no other reason.

He was also extremely jealous in guarding the women of his harem. Each of them had their own eunuch to guard her from straying. For a man, merely looking at one of his concubines carried the death penalty and it was common for men to throw themselves face first upon the ground with their eyes down to prevent any accusations from the king, which he was very liberal in brandishing, truth be damned. Once he had one of his viziers executed because a storm hit his traveling army and caused large losses, even though the vizier had zero control over it.

It wasn’t like he behaved any better towards the women of his harem either. Any one even suspected of being unfaithful to him was sentenced to, you guessed it, death. In this case the Sultan himself would strangle the unfortunate woman, or if he wanted to be extra cruel, first cut off the breasts and remove the teeth of his victim. And his method of acquiring these women in the first place was not particularly nice either, one of his conditions to make peace with a tribe he had defeated was that he would be given a daughter of the tribe’s chief for himself.

Even blood kinship did not limit his personal depravity. He had multiple of his own sons killed, perhaps most famously Moulay Mohammed al-Alim who was once the Sultan’s favourite son, but was convinced by another one of his wives to revolt as she wanted her own son to be heir to the throne. When Moulay Mohammed was captured his father ordered one of his executioners to cut an arm and a leg off in punishment. The executioner refused to spill royal blood and Moulay Ismail had to get a backup executioner to do the deed. Moulay Mohammed died of his injuries two days later.

Afterwards Moulay Ismail had both of the executioners killed as well, the first one for refusing to obey the Sultan’s orders, and the second one for spilling royal blood… I needn’t go on with further examples of Moulay Ismail’s personal depravity, although there is a lot I’m leaving out (the reason his proposed marriage with the daughter of Louis XIV did not work out was because the French feared for how she would be treated by him if she went to Morocco).

The point of the matter is, despite how immoral and nasty a person or group may be themselves, it is still possible for them to be a net good for the world on a consequential level, and this possibility only goes up the more power they have. A nasty but competent weak person will not influence wider society at all, all they will do is make life worse for those close to them. A nasty but competent powerful person has the ability to enforce order and stability throughout society, and the positive knock on effects of this can very easily outweigh all the bad stuff they get up to In their personal life.

The nastiness doesn’t have to be restricted to your personal life either, Moulay Ismail treated his Christian slaves extremely cruelly, but as long as the damage your nastiness causes is less than the benefits you provide through your competence, and there is no believable alternative that would be plausibly better, it is best for the world if you are the person/group in charge.

Note the necessity of the plausibility of the alternatives being better. The multitude of different factions competing for the Sultanship before/after Moulay Ismail all believed that they would be better for the country than any one else, but because none of them were able to convince enough nobles etc. enough to consolidate power, there was a lot of strife and the country as a whole suffered. It could even very well be true that a certain claimant to the throne after Moulay Ismail would have been a better ruler had he been given the chance, but because he could not convince wider society of this, the end result was that people were worse off.

There was a comment here a few weeks ago which mentioned that on societal scales, there is no difference between stupid and evil. I think that not only is this true, but even more, you can be so much more competent compared to the alternative (as Moulay Ismail was compared to the lawlessness that was prevalent either side of his reign) that from a consequentialist point of view it is far better for you to be running things than the alternative, your outbursts of evil notwithstanding.

Connecting this to more topical matters: Israel is obviously a morally questionable but technologically/socially superior power compared to the Arabs of the middle east. Even when they aren’t busy killing each other in internecine conflicts (see Saudi Arabia vs Yemen etc.), the are hardly able to create technologically advanced societies where humanity can flourish unless they were blessed by nature with huge oil wealth right under their feet. You can compare e.g. the UAE vs Tunisia, both are similar sized states with very similar cultures, the only big difference is that the former has oil and the latter doesn’t.

The way to see whether Israel is good or bad for the Arabs is not to compare the quality of life led by your average Israeli Jew vs your average Israeli Arab, but to compare the quality of life of an Israeli Arab vs a non-Israeli Arab. Sure, Israel treats it’s Arab citizens as second class citizens compared to the Jews, but this absolutely does not necessarily mean that the Arabs of Israel are worse off than they would be in the counterfactual.

There was an observation made by Scott on one of his old posts that the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East outside of the oil rich states was Israel. Regardless of the lack of rights afforded to Israeli Arabs compared to their Jewish counterparts, the level of ambient prosperity in Israel is so so high compared to non Oil-Rich Arab states that the quality of life enjoyed by as Israeli Arab is higher than the Arabs unfortunate enough to be born elsewhere in the middle east.

Note that is argument is general, it doesn’t apply to just the neighbours of Israel (for which you can claim that the consequences of Israeli actions have damaged those states so much that their citizens now live a much worse life not due to any faults of their own, but rather those of Israel), but to all of the non Oil-Rich Middle East. It is certainly better to be an Israeli Arab compared to a Tunisian Arab and you can’t say that the current situation of Tunisia can largely be blamed onto Israel.

Now someone may counter by saying that it doesn’t matter how much material prosperity you may have if you don’t have political rights and “freedom”, defined in some nebulous way that aligns with how westerners think of it. Except that empirically, people behave in the complete opposite way, gladly sacrificing those things for higher prosperity.

For instance, you can make a strong argument that the average hetero man back in my home country has a lot more “freedom” than if he were to go to, say the UK (freedom to own and shoot guns, freedom to drive without having to follow a huge amount of safety regulations and low speed limits, freedom to develop his property as he wishes, freedom from an onerous tax burden, freedom to buy most medicines by just showing up at the pharmacy and asking for them instead of needing to waste a GP’s and his own time, freedom to hire servants at a mutually agreeable wage instead of minimum wage regulations getting in your way etc.). I feel this personally too, when I go back home to visit my extended family compared to the life I live in the UK. However the difference in the sheer amount of “stuff” a person can buy in the UK vs back home is big enough to create a pool of millions of people who would love nothing more than to give up all this freedom just so they can go and live in the west and be able to buy more things, while there is minimal demand for my co-ethnics in the west to go back home and enjoy all this extra freedom.

You also see this on the other end of the spectrum. Amongst business professionals expat postings that come with higher salaries/fringe benefits in exchange for being sent to a different country where you have zero political rights and are always at the risk of being expelled from the land because your visa renewal was refused are generally highly prized rather than being seen as a trap to avoid. If “political representation” and “right to choose those who lead you” were really all that valuable these professionals wouldn’t be jumping over each other to get these postings where you get paid 75% more and are given two return tickets back home each year to leave your homeland in live amongst foreigners who probably don’t even speak the same language as you.

Another demonstration of the low value of a representative vote to choose what the future will look like vs getting more material prosperity can be seen in the share prices of public companies that issue multiple classes of stock. Often there is a B class of shares that are exactly the same as the standard A class of shares when it comes to dividends and portion of ownership of the company’s assets, except that the B class shares don’t get a vote. The value of a vote can then be computed by comparing the price difference between the two classes of shares.

Yesterday the Alphabet Class A share (which gets voting rights) closed at 138.06, while the Class C share (which is equivalent to the class A share but does not get voting rights) closed at 139.20 . So actually the share with voting rights was selling for ~1% less than the share without voting rights (this is a quirk of the system caused by a short term supply/demand imbalance, normally the shares are within a few cents of each other). This goes to show how much a vote is actually worth, namely very very little compared to using the extra money in buying cheaper shares to buy more of them and get a better return on your capital (in Google’s case the founders have a majority of voting power so you can sort of explain why a vote you can buy isn’t worth anything, but even for companies where this is not the case, voting stock tends to be valued within a few cents of the equivalent non-voting stock).

Putting it all together it’s quite clear, both from the high level outside view, as well as the empirical evidence of where people choose to go if they are allowed to, that even though the rulers of a society may not be deontologically acting in particularly nice ways, and that there is a subgroup which is doing worse than they would otherwise be doing if the rulers would “just change their behavior” and allow them more say in how the place is run, the choice in reality is often not “nasty” rulers vs “nice” rulers, but rather “nasty” rulers vs even nastier alternative, and in that case the net change in sum total welfare of those “oppressed” by these rulers may well be more positive than every other plausible world, and so the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.

I can't say I disagree, while I haven't read much of Moldbug, his politics being rather unappealing, I think I would be largely indifferent to living under the rule of Fnargl, right up till the end of his reign when his incentives to maximize productivity through means conducive to human flourishing cease to exist.

Prosperity is moderately contagious, even if trickledown economics is dubious (I hold no strong opinion on the latter), Palestinians would be far better served being the Mexico to Israel's US instead of doing, well, whatever they've been doing.

But revealed preferences suggest that quite a few angry young men are ready to die for their "freedom", and I wish them well, at least in the dying part.

Besides, it always struck me as very confusing how much the average citizen in the West values their political power, my single vote in India is outweighed by over a billion others, and the marginal influence of the average person is near nonexistent even when the denominator is a mere few millions.

Democracy was born in Athenian city states, and that's where it's strongest. I'll take Singapore myself, not that they'll take me.

I've linked this elsewhere today as well, but you'll probably enjoy Nozick's The tale of a slave if you haven't seen it before.

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.

1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.

2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.

3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.

4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.

5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him threesevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.

6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.

Let us pause in this sequence of cases to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed monster can do this also.

7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers.

8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)

9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome

The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave?

Well, I certainly get the points that libertarians try to make that living under a state is only a difference in degree and not kind from being a slave. I'm not a card carrying one myself, just sympathetic and believing that the government should restrict the activities of its people to the bare minimum necessary. Maybe that makes me a minarchist, but categories were made for man and it's not always a cozy fit.

The average person is politically impotent, they wouldn't even notice if procedural democracy was replaced by a dictator and the media just kept on acting like nothing had changed. I am at peace with that, even if I wish otherwise, and it can't be otherwise until everyone owns a Von Neumann replicator that provides all the products of technological civilization, and is a Sovereign Citizen in the same way that states are sovereign. And even then they'll have to deal with the Uranian Home Owner's Association, which is just about as much a PITA as it sounds.

Hmm, I'll work that one into my novel.

The average person is politically impotent, they wouldn't even notice if procedural democracy was replaced by a dictator and the media just kept on acting like nothing had changed.

I don't think this applies to just the average person. Do you really think that even high IQ individuals would notice if votes and polling were both altered to reflect the wishes of the hidden dictator? We could very plausibly be living in a world like that right now.

Expand a word's definition enough and you end up with a useless word and a smug feeling.

At 5 we cross from slavery as I expect a reasonable person to understand it to subjecthood (as in "subject of the Crown", perhaps).

Right. At 4, the slave is still beaten for not picking cotton, and has to live on the master's plantation. At 5, the slave can move to LA and pay for a fourth of an apartment by working as a plumber, buy a laptop, get a girlfriend or a boyfriend, and start posting a lot on Tumblr, and maybe even quit their job as a plumber if they get enough fanart commissions. This really is a substantial difference, and is much of what people would object to about slavery. (I'd rather be able to decide my occupation and place of residence but be beaten sometimes than the opposite). The best arguments for voting, liberal democracy, etc are that it preserves the substantive rights and abilities that people gain between 2 and 5.

At 5 we mostly cross from slavery: notably, someone can do nothing whatsoever or whatever they want.

Main sticking point would be

He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.

depending on how it works in practise (there is a substantial difference between ban (1) on selling stuff heavily radioactive food / poisonous milk for small children / fentanyl / cigarettes from (2) need to obtain permission before pregnancy or ban on mountain climbing)

I see what author tried to achieve, but no it does not prove that taxes are morally equivalent to slavery. And no, not equivalent to robbery or theft either.

Reminds me very much of Vlad the Impaler. By Romanians themselves he is regarded as a just tyrant that defended his homeland. He was exceptionally cruel to his enemies, but he - together with many Romanians - saw that as necessary to keep order and peace. By his enemies, he was allegedly slandered as a petty psychopath.

You obviously need to be careful either way, but it's imo very notable that on everything important and relatively verifiable, Moulay always was cruel only to true enemies. Nobody even claims that the sons or wifes he killed weren't conspiring against him. As far as I can see the claimed exceptional depravity strictly was about unverifiable slaves and such. I wouldn't be surprised if he was in truth a relatively just ruler, even if extremely cruel.

Of course, it could also be the other way - that Vlad was inappropriately idealized by Romanians. I wouldn't be surprised about that either, and in history this kind of ambiguity is kind of fundamental.

I agree, and I think another great example is North Korea. North Korea isn’t the ultimate example of a hellhole country because it’s a dictatorship, or because the Kim family are absolute monarchs, or because its political system is brutally repressive, or even because of the lack of real rule of law. I’d go further and say it’s not even the gulags. It’s because North Korea is unfathomably poor. The bulk of the population live in grinding poverty almost unheard elsewhere on earth. According to some estimates, North Korea’s average wage is $2-3 a month at black market exchange rates, South Korea’s is $3,000 a month.

If North Korea’s median income was $20,000 or even $10,000 a year, it would be merely another moderate income tyranny, like others around the world. More brutal, perhaps, and more geopolitically relevant, certainly, but otherwise uninteresting. It is because North Korea’s rulers (who oversee its centrally planned economy) are so incompetent at providing a materially decent life for their subjects in the modern era that their country has become a universal byword for hell on earth. Stories of people shot for saying the wrong thing are sad, but the true horror of North Korea is millions starving because they don’t have enough food.

And Dubai, of course, is another example. As I think many of us (yourself included) said when the soccer world cup was happening last year, a life as a laborer in the Gulf is for many a young South Asian man preferable - despite the lack of a vote, possible racial discrimination, no rights - to a life back home in South Asia. So what really matters? You could say that rulers can be evaluated domestically on two primary metrics: civil order (including crime) and societal prosperity. In truth, rich repressive countries still allow most citizens to live decent, comfortable enough lives. No extremely poor countries do so, regardless of their level of freedom.

North Korea isn’t the ultimate example of a hellhole country because it’s a dictatorship, or because the Kim family are absolute monarchs, or because its political system is brutally repressive, or even because of the lack of real rule of law. I’d go further and say it’s not even the gulags. It’s because North Korea is unfathomably poor.

It's unfathomably poor because of all the factors from your first sentence.

The bulk of the population live in grinding poverty almost unheard elsewhere on earth. According to some estimates, North Korea’s average wage is $2-3 a month at black market exchange rates, South Korea’s is $3,000 a month.

The average wage is worthless because it's a socialist economy. Their de facto pay is organized outside the market system, via rations and other such methods.

the true horror of North Korea is millions starving because they don’t have enough food.

During the 1990s a few hundred thousand died in famine. North Korea is a poor country but not that poor. Life expectancy is slightly above world average.

Life expectancy is slightly above world average.

Is that a product of affluency beyond avoiding starvation, though? North Korea doesn't have the issues with random stateless violence, Civil War, HIV and tropical diseases that I'd imagine define the very low life expectancies of a lot of countries.

If anyone wants to see this idea explored in a fantasy setting you should check out The Black Company. As the series go on, you think of the initial antagonist in a different light based on how the other leaders of the world are and you see her point of view. Spoiler alert for a book series that ended 20 years ago:

The person who worked hardest to defeat her in the initial part of the series ends up restoring her sorcery in the last book so she can in theory go back to doing what she was doing in the first book. Whether or not she does and if she can resist the temptation of absolute power is left up to the reader. She actually was the most competent ruler of everyone in the book and if you lived under her rule and didn't resist your life would have been better than under anyone else. You also see she is one of the few powerful sorcerers that has any morality and humanity at all, so maybe she wasn't that bad after all once you see the other options.

In fiction it is relatively easy to whitewash any monster by ensuring that everyone else is a even a greater monster.

Nevertheless, my experience from reading history is that, if anything, fiction has a tendency to be idealized & sanitized compared to it. "Everyone else was a greater monster" was very often the best thing you could say about a larger number of rulers.

Let’s apply this principle to other cases (all may answer of course):

  1. Should we surrender to the Han Chinese, once the Chinese Middle Class is wealthier than ours? We may eventually have to speak Chinese and surely we will all eventually have a Han Chinese genetic infusion. Would this be the correct choice implying China is wealthier than us? Invite them to conquer us?

  2. Was Ancient Israel in the wrong for revolting against Rome? From a purely material standpoint, ancient Israel would have been more prosperous under perpetual Roman occupation, and all they would need to do is worship the emperor and the Roman pantheon. There would probably be no Judaism left as a result. How many Jews would say this was actually the right choice? Instead the Jews fought back; they were defeated but continued their religion; 1800 years later they have their own nation again. And they rejoice at this fact that, though they were in the wilderness, they held faithfully to the promised land. The Palestinians, of course, are also the descendants of the ancient Jews.

Should we surrender to the Han Chinese, once the Chinese Middle Class is wealthier than ours? We may eventually have to speak Chinese and surely we will all eventually have a Han Chinese genetic infusion. Would this be the correct choice implying China is wealthier than us? Invite them to conquer us?

Every economic projection of note, within a time span relevant, suggests this not going to happen and that China will plateau before catching up to the US.

So an obvious no.

Was Ancient Israel in the wrong for revolting against Rome? From a purely material standpoint, ancient Israel would have been more prosperous under perpetual Roman occupation, and all they would need to do is worship the emperor and the Roman pantheon. There would probably be no Judaism left as a result. How many Jews would say this was actually the right choice? Instead the Jews fought back; they were defeated but continued their religion; 1800 years later they have their own nation again. And they rejoice at this fact that, though they were in the wilderness, they held faithfully to the promised land. The Palestinians, of course, are also the descendants of the ancient Jews.

It was a stupid decision, given that the Romans beat the snot out of them. If you don't expect to win the revolution, don't bother.

To apply @BurdensomeCountTheWhite's argument to these situations, the Chinese and Romans would have to establish their rule by force and maintain order. Then they could be judged as least-worst among all the other contenders based on how beneficial the pax China/Romana was. If the subjugated peoples are considering revolt then the rulers haven't done their job yet.

The way to see whether Israel is good or bad for the Arabs is not to compare the quality of life led by your average Israeli Jew vs your average Israeli Arab, but to compare the quality of life of an Israeli Arab vs a non-Israeli Arab. Sure, Israel treats it’s Arab citizens as second class citizens compared to the Jews, but this absolutely does not necessarily mean that the Arabs of Israel are worse off than they would be in the counterfactual.

This argument has been deployed in the past to justify chattel slavery and segregation, also with a large element of truth. I am sympathetic to this argument, by the way, but the problem is we were supposed to have "learned our lessons" and reformed society to reject these arguments that justified structures of alleged racial oppression. The United States emancipated the slaves, racially integrated public spaces and has essentially outlawed segregation even in private spaces, and granted equal rights to racial minorities all in a rejection of this argument you have presented. Immigration has been liberalized so much that demographic change is inevitable, and opposing demographic change makes you an evil Nazi. Accepting masses of refugees and illegal immigrants with open arms is supposed to be downstream of these lessons we have learned, lessons which were brought to us from the 20th century mythos- a mythos in which Jews played a central role.

Hoffmeister recently suggested that the Zionists tossing aside 20th century moralizing to solve this problem may awaken something in Europeans. But Carl Schmitt wrote "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception", and Zionism has declared a state of exception to these 20th century moral lessons that the rest of us are forced to live under, and are forced to accept all the radical consequences thereof. I don't really support Palestine, but I reject Zionism declaring the state of exception because I reject its sovereignty, not because I think your argument is wrong. I'm not going to give Zionism a pass because experience has proven beyond doubt that White people supporting Zionism earns -zero- reciprocity, supporting their declaration of the state of exception is not going grant one iota of benefit in my opposition to this moral paradigm. It's not even going to undermine the moral paradigm, as the sovereign declaring a state of exception solidifies the status of the sovereign and the underlying paradigm.

If Israel were to follow the post-war moral paradigm which has been forced upon Europe and the Western World, it would have long ago advocated a single-state solution with full equal political rights afforded to the Palestinians, right of return, outlawed ethnic segregation, pushed Affirmative Action for Palestinians in University and Government, accepted large-scale immigration from its Arab neighbors, and socially and legally repressed every Jewish Israeli who had anything bad to say about their emancipated Arab compatriots.

There are plenty of Jews who support or supported that kind of thing, or who (like George Soros) supported NGOs that worked to undermine Israeli policy on African mass immigration, the treatment of Arabs, etc. But most have been radicalized by reality.

One thing you forget is that no European terror attack has been as visceral or even 1/10th as large (as a percentage of the total population) as this in terms of casualty count. Islamist attacks in Europe are still rare, there has still not been, 20 years later, an attack even close to the size of 9/11 against a Westen country, and while one is probably inevitable it hasn’t yet materialized. Additional secondary consequences of mass immigration like Rotherham primarily involved underclass victims and unfolded over a long period of time with limited public photographic or video evidence for obvious reasons, and higher crime rates are both hard to quantify and in most of Europe rates are still down on the 90s or early 00s peak.

If what had happened to Israel in the weekend had happened in Germany (with the victims German civilians) I think your insinuation that policy toward Islamism and mass immigration wouldn’t change is wrong. It really doesn’t take much to radicalize Europeans, and ironically the far right often buys into the “culture is totally supreme over biology” leftist blank statism when it comes to the supposed effect of 20th century progressive ideas on Western publics far more than it ought to.

I reject Zionism declaring the state of exception because I reject its sovereignty

Why do you reject its sovereignty?

One thing you forget is that no European terror attack has been as visceral or even 1/10th as large (as a percentage of the total population) as this in terms of casualty count.

The Madrid bombings were. Spain responded by capitulating.

(never mind, I though the 1/10th as large referred to 9/11, which you mentioned later. 9/11 was 9 deaths per million, Madrid was 4)

The Madrid bombings were an order of magnitude less destructive than the Hamas raid on Israel, in a country an order of magnitude larger. They also didn't involve sexual humiliation of Spanish women.

It probably doesn't matter, but any attempt to unite the country was blown by the Aznar government telling the ridiculously obvious lie that the bombings had been carried out by ETA.

Spain has 50 million people and 200 died. I don’t know that that’s comparable. But yeah, that whole episode is often forgotten in the whole ‘terrorism doesn’t work’ discourse.

Why do you reject its sovereignty?

Yeah that's unclear, I mean the sovereignty of International Zionism writ large, its sovereignty over me. The sovereignty of Zionist Jews to tell me I'm the most evil person in the world and have no right to have any sort of ethnic identity or advocate for my ethnic interests, and then they turn around and say they are the exception to the 20th century moral lessons and can basically do anything necessary to secure their ethno-state. They haven't recently been "radicalized", they've always been radicalized, their hostility towards White ethnic identity and interests combined with their hyper-ethno nationalism has always been radical, it's just that they can no longer even pretend to care about following the same rules they enforce on the rest of us.

The fact they are able to basically toss out the rule book with the support of the Western world is proof of their undue sovereignty over the international community. Europeans are thrown in jail for saying mean things about immigrants, while Israel just lives in an entirely different moral universe. It's proof of their centrality to the moral paradigm we live under, that they are above and beyond it and can declare a state of exception in their own conquests. But this isn't going to weaken or fracture the underlying moral paradigm, it's literally just "you have to follow the rules and we don't, we decide when and where the rules apply and we decide the rules don't apply to us here, there's nothing you can do about it", it's an exercise in sovereignty.

So what’s your view on Israelis in Israel and what they ought, in your moral framework, to do?

My view is that Zionism exerts undue and harmful influence over my own civilization. They have exerted influence in all areas of economic and cultural life to browbeat white gentiles with "moral lessons" that have disarmed them from essential and necessary ethnic self-regard, with irreversible consequences (Rep. Israel is now talking about the "least heinous option" when defending Israel by the way). They view white identity and ethnocentrism as intrinsically hostile to their self-interest, a belief which you share, so they work to suppress it while extracting financial, military, and political benefit from the Western world toward their own ethno-nationalist project.

You are correct that the anti-Zionism from the DR isn't going to change demographics or even the short-term migrant trends in the United States and Europe. But pointing out that the Zionists are poised to engage in an ethnic cleansing with the support of the US State Department goes a long way in discrediting the notion of Jews as the moral light unto the world. It is very strong evidence for the DR argument that Jewish moralizing towards white gentiles is their mode of engaging in conflict with perceived ethnic rivals and is motivated by ethnic self-interest rather than universal morality.

My moral framework relies on dispelling the pathologizing of white identity. Supporting the Zionists does nothing for that, except it reinforces their status as being above and beyond the standards that are imposed on us.

As far as what they should do, of course ethnic cleansing is the most practical solution here, but my moral framework would suggest I hold Zionists accountable to the moral framework that has been imposed on the West. I gain nothing by supporting their own ethnonationalism while knowing for a fact they will continue to work against white ethnonationalism.

that has been opposed on the West

I think you meant "imposed" here.

Thanks.

So in effect you admit that, were you a Jew, you’d do exactly what they’re doing?

If I were a Jewish Zionist in all likelihood I would support what they are planning to do, but that doesn't undermine any of my reasons for opposing it as a non-Jew. I certainly wouldn't want the standards that Rep. Israel is advocating for whites to be applied to myself, either (and neither does Rep. Israel!).

But yeah, if I were a Jewish Zionist I would be unlikely to have a problem with the "rules for thee but not for me" state of affairs. I would like to think I have more intellectual honesty than that but empirically the chances of that being true don't look great.

I'm not going to give Zionism a pass because experience has proven beyond doubt that White people supporting Zionism earns -zero- reciprocity

Israel was pretty famously one of the last countries in the world backing and arming the white minority governments of South Africa and Rhodesia, and the current government has always preferred and advocated for conservative, anti-immigration parties in the US.

the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.

And now a hundred years later, what remains are a few monuments, and the colossal negative impact he had on the gene pool. Are you sure you mean to be constructing a defense of Moulay Ismail on utilitarian grounds?

Negative impact on the gene pool? What negative impact would this be, having 1,000 children in a society of millions of humans will do pretty much nothing to the effective population size compared to if those children all had different fathers. You might complain about inbreeding but the portion of that that's attributable to him directly starts falling off after 10 generations due to how recombination works (more than that amount of time has passed now).

What negative impact would this be

Your description of Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif suggests he was a psychopath. Psychopathy is largely genetic. Now I can understand that a resurrected vampire might find it novel or even contentious to think that increasing the incidence of psychopathic traits across the population might be undesirable. But trust me, we mortals are pretty leery of the Dark Triad.

Now I can understand that a resurrected vampire might find it novel or even contentious to think that increasing the incidence of psychopathic traits across the population might be undesirable.

But can you turn that one-sentence pitch into a 12-page treatment in time for lunch next Tuesday with Mr. Penn? (And Wednesday with Mr. Cage, the safety school of Hollywood Productions.)

Are you arguing that ruthlessness and effective rule are correlated, or merely that effective rule is not necessarily nice?

Ruthlessness isn’t a proxy for ruling well. His lopping-off slaves’s heads character trait is at best orthogonal to his ruling quality. Pol Pot and the Kims are ruthless, most of the failed states are ruled by psychos. Look at africa, Moulay’s roots, and bask in the good times these hard men have brought.

Merely that effective rule is not necessarily nice. I'm not saying at all that being ruthless gives you something positive by itself to help you rule better.

Would you agree that modern regimes are, as a whole, nicer, that historical ones? Why is that? Is it a good thing? During the Napoleonic wars, which of the two main powers, England and France, were 'nicer' to the other powers of Europe?

To me there is a civilisational floor of 'incivility' below which the returns of cruelty are infinitely higher than above it. This is due to focus of states tending outside of its borders as its own stability, be it Republican longevity or Monarchic pedigree, increases. Or, to put it another way, when you have a group of neighbouring states that are primarily concerned with internal affairs, the likelihood of collective action to punish (/exploit their weakness for personal gain) any one is less likely. Cruelty gives a great excuse for intervention.

You know who this Moulay Ismail reminds me of? Joseph Stalin. Your apology reads exactly like Stalinist apology. Order and security, relative stability, building monumental structures all over the country, being respected by the leaders of other superpowers... Did Moroccan peasants actually enjoy his rule, or did his tight control over the country result in their successful overexploitation to fuel his war or construction efforts?

The difference is that Russia under Stalin was still so poor that by the early 50s East Germany, which had been totally destroyed by the war and had its most valuable surviving industrial equipment shipped wholesale to Russia as war loot, was already the richest country in the Eastern Bloc merely because of the legacy of industrial capitalism from the pre-communist era. Stalin oversaw famines and starvation, threw mountains of men at Hitler in a series of severe strategic blunders, and failed by 1953 to ensure a standard of living even close to a western capitalist country, or indeed what a Russia that had remained capitalist after 1917 might have reasonably achieved.

If Stalin’s Russia in 1953 was as wealthy as France (by median household income, say), very few in history would consider him a bad leader and - of course - the trajectory of socialist economics would likely be very different.

Perhaps the difference is that Stalin acted in a technological society (in relation to the 18th century), in which much was invested in the capital and human development, because they are the main determinants of economic fortune; wars are destructive in this environment, even for the winner. Moulay Ismail, on the other hand, acted in pre-modern agarian society, where the land is a key economic contribution, and the war of conquest is quickly profitable, even if the peasants are killed - it has not undergone a demographic transformation, so the population is quickly recovering.

threw mountains of men at Hitler

That's a generic boo outgrop. Stalin had just about 2x more men at his disposal, overall losses are about 1.5 Soviet soldier of 1 killed German soldier.

If you or others are interested, the blogger Nintil did a cool deep dive into the claims for vs against economic growth under Stalin. The tl;dr is that Stalin probably achieved more industrialization than Czarist Russia would have if it continued on its present path (which it's worth remembering was basically Import Substitute Industrialization and probably would have pewtered out). Stalinism still achieved less than a counterfactual Czarist Russia likely could have achieved if they had genuinely liberalized, but who knows if they would have done that.

This is leaving aside of course the cost of human suffering, which would have made the system not worth it either way.

And not just this, but what man can overlook his personal harem of over 500 women, through which he sired over 800 confirmed children

By the way, the question if that is true won the Ig Nobel prize:

https://www.thelocal.at/20150918/austrian-wins-ig-nobel-for-sexual-prowess-study

They worked out that it was theoretically possible, if the leader had sex once a day for 32 years without a break. “It’s a lot of work it turns out,” Oberzaucher said. “Moulay had to have had sex once or twice a day, which you might actually regard as a low number, but if you think this is every single day for an entire life, this is quite a lot.” She added that it would have been especially hard work for Ismail as he was often off fighting wars.

The paper:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085292

The algorithm is based on three different models of conception and different social and biological constraints. In the first model we used a random mating pool with unrestricted access to females. In the second model we used a restricted harem pool. The results indicate that Moulay Ismael could have achieved this high reproductive success.

Now someone may counter by saying that it doesn’t matter how much material prosperity you may have if you don’t have political rights and “freedom”, defined in some nebulous way that aligns with how westerners think of it. Except that empirically, people behave in the complete opposite way, gladly sacrificing those things for higher prosperity.

Except that empirically, many people also gladly sacrifice prosperity, or even their lives, in an effort to obtain or preserve civil rights and, more importantly, the dignity that recognition of rights entails. Your analysis is way too neat; it fails to explain, among other things, the actions of the Hamas fighters who died in the attack; surely, if they valued prosperity above all things, they would be pushing for the recognition of Israel's right to exist, or staying home playing video games, or doing anything other than risking their lives. It also fails to explain why people ever quit jobs when they are treated in a way which they consider unjust. Nor even why people will often refuse to patronize a store with the lowest prices, but rudest employees, in town. Nor why some people choose to sacrifice income and comfort to live in rural areas where they are left alone.

Not all actions are instrumentally rationality; there is such thing as value rationality as well ["Value-rational behavior is produced by a conscious “ethical, aesthetic, religious or other” belief, “independently of its prospects of success.”6 Behavior, when driven by such values, can consciously embrace great personal sacrifices. Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be."].

Bottom line: Whether Arabs in Israel are "better off" overall simply because they have greater material comfort is a normative question that has no single correct answer.

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).

Duncan v. Bonta drops, again:

Here, a stay is appropriate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presumably raising an army or building nukes is off the table

Why, though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why can’t I field a battalion of tanks?

You can. What's stopping you?

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

No, it means functional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

wanting a stock Viper is not part of the Second Amendment

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

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

The AGM-80 is more just wildly impractical.

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

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

I was thinking of the other other Viper.

infernal machine

Well. I guess I learned something today.


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