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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   21282 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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No good news are coming from anywhere, whether from culture wars or the real ones. As fitting for Friday the 13th.

Except one thing that is large, and good.

First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student

Crucified bird thread

For ancient history nerds, this is big, really big. Imagine how will space nerds feel if/when Elon delivers what he promised and gets his Starship to the orbit. This big.

So what is the hype about?

Ancient books were in form of scrolls made of papyrus that had to be constantly rolled and unrolled in order to be read. This was hard on the material, and ancient books had limited shelf time(pun intended).

Ancient libraries needed constant recopying of books to stay functional, and this was laborious and expensive (no need to blame Christians or Muslims for destruction of ancient literature, ordinary daily wear and tear would be sufficient). No surprise that new revolutionary technology of bound book took the world by storm.

All ancient libraries are long gone - except one, found in Herculaneum under 100 feet of volcanic ash. And not ordinary library, but library of wealthy Roman, owner of one of most luxurious villas known from the Roman Empire.

You can visit modern replica in California.

Nearly two thousands of ancient scrolls, unfortunately they now looked like this.

For 250 years, ancient history nerds didn't gave up and tried to find ways to read the scrolls. Mostly destructive ways

Since their discovery, previous attempts used rose water, liquid mercury, vegetable gas, sulfuric compounds, papyrus juice, or a mixture of ethanol, glycerin, and warm water, in hopes to make scrolls readable.

but they sometimes worked.

By the middle of the 20th century, only 585 rolls or fragments had been completely unrolled, and 209 unrolled in part. Of the unrolled papyri, about 200 had been deciphered and published, and about 150 only deciphered.

Now we can finally do better. So what can we hope for?

Do not expect lost masterpieces of classical literature.

Owner of the library was single mindedly dedicated to philosophy, particularly Epicurean philosophy. Expect more writings by Philodemus of Gadara, Zeno of Sidon and Epicurus himself.

Epicureans, these pig ignorant fedora atheists whose teachings can appeal only to the worst degenerates, as Stoics, Jews and Christians said (and as their major competitors, they had to know best)?

(after 2000 years, "epicurean" is still insult used for secular Jews by their observant brothers)

Or Epicureans, founders of science and inventors of modern enlightened values?

The revival of Epicureanism in the 17th century coincided with the growth of scientific rationalism and classical liberalism. There can be no doubt these facts are connected. It may, indeed, be argued that the first was a leading cause of the second two, and that we are now living in a world shaped, in every worthwhile sense, by the ideas of Epicurus.

We could finally find out, we could read Epicurus' and Epicureans own words instead of fragments and more or less hostile refutations. For true ancient history nerd, this would be as exciting as finding new poem by Sappho or new play by Euripides.

Thanks for this, great to hear something constructive instead of destructive for once. A light on ancient history that was long lost, and an amazing union of technology and human enthusiasm and learning.

That's pretty awesome, thanks for throwing some positive news at us.

Owner of the library was single mindedly dedicated to philosophy, particularly Epicurean philosophy. Expect more writings by Philodemus of Gadara, Zeno of Sidon and Epicurus himself.

Damn. Possibly the least interesting thing that could've come out of there, as far as I'm concerned.

Still a good thing to hear about, though. Nice.

Damn. Possibly the least interesting thing that could've come out of there, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, there is hope (or wishful thinking) that the scrolls were only small part of villa library, that they were special Epicurean collection most valued by the owner (the scrolls were not on shelves, they were packed in chests, ready to be carted away).

Alternatively, they were possessions of previous owner inherited by new owner, who was not interested in Epicureanism, put them off shelves into storage space and forgot about them.

Well off and cultured Romans would own more books. Villa owner was one of 1% of 1% of Roman Empire and definitely was a man of culture.

Its luxury is shown by its exquisite architecture and by the large number of outstanding works of art discovered, including frescoes, bronzes and marble sculpture which constitute the largest collection of Greek and Roman sculptures ever discovered in a single context.

Such house would be expected to have two large symmetrical libraries, one Greek and one Latin containing classical works of the respective literature.

More details and sources in Reddit thread

Alternatively, they were possessions of previous owner inherited by new owner, who was not interested in Epicureanism, put them off shelves into storage space and forgot about them.

That's a highly plausible interpretation; and not in any way incompatible with this library being one of the most important advances in the human search for truth.

Certainly Epicurean philosophy has a greater claim to the word "truth" than whatever anyone on here may have to say about Hunter Biden.

Here is an interesting an article about the library and what its contents may be. An excerpt:

It’s unlikely the Herculaneum villa’s library only contained this stuff. It’s all too narrow and niche in subject, and by all accounts the ancient elite were proud of amassing diverse collections in their libraries, and embarrassed not to have succeeded ... What we have appears to merely be a couple of shelves of volumes, maybe just one bookcase, all from the same spot, probably swept directly into the crates we found them in and staged in the courtyard to await a wagon to haul them.

There would have been a great deal else. Literature, history, science. Epistolaries, miscellanies, essays. Memoirs, novels, biographies. Satires. The work of orators and poets. Philosophy and mathematics. Scientific studies and technical manuals. Dictionaries and encyclopedias; and more ...

...

Consider the sole exception to the subject-theme of the books we recovered from the courtyard staging area: a lost history of Seneca the Elder (the then-famous father of the now-famous Seneca). Sadly, we can’t fully reconstruct it due to extensive damage. But it would have been nice to get it all, because that history ran up to the end of the reign of Tiberius, making it a text (heretofore entirely lost) recording Roman history during the very time when Jesus is supposed to have lived, which was written by a contemporary to those events. Since it began its narrative during the civil war of Julius Caesar, it only covered a single-century span of events, which could mean it was quite detailed. Could it have discussed Judean affairs in any important way? What about other things, unrelated to Christianity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the "safe edgy" meme!

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

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

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

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

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

  • -18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nor have I failed to engage with Byrne's ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As much so as 99% of existing philosophy professors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I loved Wikipedia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remember when I started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia will soon eat its own in a purity spiral.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reminds me of the site we recently left...

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

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

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

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

I loved Wikipedia

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

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

auto-reverted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay.

sacrilege. I'm not exaggerating.

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

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

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

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

adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide." Or at least, the turn of the legislative season. Some life changes have led to Less Posting, as I've had to focus on more meatspace matters. But the legislative roundup is worth doing. Here's my understanding and my take on the 2022-2023 California legislative season as it relates to housing. (See also Alfred Twu's very detailed writeup (PDF).)

(Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Also at /r/theschism.)

This has largely been a successful year. While the YIMBYs didn't get everything they wanted, they got a lot of it, and they are very happy. The major wins:

The major losses:

Note that while the Governor's veto can theoretically be overriden by a two-thirds vote, that hasn't happened since 1980. Also vetoed despite passing the Legislature: SB 58, psychedelics decriminalization (veto message) and SB 403, banning caste discrimination (veto message).

There's some speculation that Governor Newsom is trying to avoid signing anything that would look bad during a Presidential run. Hot take: "Californians suffering so their governor can finish 4th in New Hampshire, they have more in common with Florida than they think".

There's some speculation that Governor Newsom is trying to avoid signing anything that would look bad during a Presidential run.

Then why did he veto price caps on insulin? That’s like the most popular proposal there is.

According to this veto message:

In March, I announced the state's partnership with Civica to create our own line of CalRx biosimilar insulins that will cost no more than $30 per 10ml vial or $55 for five 3ml cartridges. This is a fraction of the current price for most insulins, and CalRx biosimilar insulins will be available to insured and uninsured patients nationwide. With CalRx, we are getting at the underlying cost, which is the true sustainable solution to high-cost pharmaceuticals. With copay caps however, the long-term costs are still passed down to consumers through higher premiums from health plans. As a state, we have led the nation in our efforts and investments to address the true underlying costs of insulin prescription affordability.

Here's the site on CalRx. They plan to start manufacturing next year.

Good to have you back! Your Cali legislative updates were always helpful to this San Diegan. (A relatively recent arrival, I only had the one chance to punch a ballot with Angelyne's name on it. And actually punched the box to vote for her, too, because that recall was weird.)

I'm glad to see the YIMBY movement is gaining strength; and that Ron DeSantis quip is funny as all hell.

The attack on Israel as the Right's George Floyd Moment

I wanted to make this a more fleshed-out post, but I'm swamped with midterms at the moment

Post-2020 George Floyd, there was a massive unification around BLM, defund the police, etc. I think we all remember some of the worst parts of that dynamic: the media deciding 'moral clarity' was necessary instead of providing both sides. Of those skeptical of the defund the police movement, only the worst/least coherent voices were elevated ("weakmanning"). People who didn't believe in the narrative were decried as the 'worst people', there were calls to fire people who made statements outside of the Orthodoxy, etc. Blanket characterization of the motivations of the other side as 'bigotry', 'racism', etc without further investigation

Does anyone else have the feeling the same thing is happening with regards to Israel? I used to like Bari Weiss' The Free Press (or, Common Sense when it started out), precisely because they were willing to challenge orthodoxies, and dive into the motivations of those who had controversial thoughts. However,it seems the same belief in 'critical thinking' is not applied to Israel; the worst of the pro-Palestine protests are elevated (photos of the swastika being held up, people chanting gas the Jews, etc), and broad characterization of the motives of anyone who does not strongly condemn the other side as anti-semitic. Now, while I do think there are anti-semites on the pro-palestine side in the traditional sense, due to the long history of tensions between muslims/jews, I do think there are many American liberals that are actual self-consistent about this and do not support the attacks because they hate Jews. I saw a tweet perfectly capturing this, that if Natives had done a similar attacks on Americans, they would have supported it, even if they had been a victim. Thus, I think it's actually broadly wrong to decry it as anti-semitism, as it points at some deeper pathologies in the left that deserve to be explored and interregated. I get why Bari is perhaps arguing - this is a moment that "requires" moral clarity - but I think we see what happens when we let the media be the one that makes those decisions. I'm sure the NYT employees post-George Floyd had the exact same feeling, and from an epistomological perspective, this feeling is not hard enough evidence to abandon the key journalistic principles of approaching the other side in good faith, allowing each side to make the best case for its side, etc.

I am also seeing a strong (and intentional) attempt to enforce consenus by many on the right/anti-woke/center left. Screencaps of professors/employees/leadership saying things that are out of the desired consensus, @tting their institution to get their attention, etc. People who are skeptical of certain aspects and express that skepticism of the narrative (the beheaded babies) are screencapped and shared as 'the worst people'. Does this remind anyone of what happened to those who were simply skeptical of the narrative that American police were on some racist killing spree, and demanded to see harder evidence?

In short, I see three things happening:

  1. Aborgation of jouralistic principles in favor of 'moral clarity' by outlets that were founded as a reaction to the moral clarity moment, with the justification that this moment now is actually such a moment where it is necessary because they feel it to be so (how could you not feel otherwise?!?)
  2. Elevation of the worst people of the pro-palestinian side (gas the jews chants, swastika shown, etc)
  3. Blanket characterization of the pro-palestinian side as antisemitic
  4. Use of instutional power to attempt to remove dissidents
  5. Characterizations of those even just skeptical of the details of the attacks as "the worst people"
  6. Strong consensus-building by rooting actively searching for, widely sharing, and rooting out dissendents (why haven't institution X made a statement?)

I am strongly Pro-Israel and anti-Hamas (with sympathy for the Palestinians caught in this), but I hate this dynamic, I hated it when it happened on the left, and it's disappointing to see it happen on the right and the "anti-cancel culture"/centrist left.

Edit: Fixed typo "I like the same 'critical thinking' believe is not applied to Israel" -> "It seems the same 'critical thinking' is not applied to Israel"

I understand your point, but isn't the obvious comparison much more 9/11 than George Floyd? Yeah, there's a bunch of event-induced psychosis going around, but at least the event is genuinely one of the most horrifying things to happen in a first-world country. The scale of maiming, rape, murder, and torture is indisputably large even if a few claims (the beheading babies one) will turn out to be questionable. In contrast, George Floyd was one crackhead idiot that died because he acted like a crackhead idiot and ran into the wrong cop that showed callous indifference to his apparent suffering. That triggering a nationwide outpouring of rage with dozens dead in riots and billions of damage done to cities was pretty striking. At least 9/11 and YomKippur2.0 were the kinds of things that would cause any neurotypical person to get pretty angry in response.

Also of note, mild dissidence isn't resulting in massive condemnation, it's approval of Hamas that's getting that retort. Maybe you think people that say, "by any means necessary" in support of Palestine shouldn't be on the butt end of cultural harshness either, but they would be the equivalent of someone saying, "good, we need a thousand George Floyds dead in the street", not someone mildly questioning what exactly the Minneapolis Police policy is with regard to restraint.

9/11 is a better comparison, but the way emotions drove discourse and public policy in the post-9/11 era was... let's say, not optimal for the USA's interests. As well as pretty stultifying.

Oh, I agree, that's why I think it's such a helpful comparison.

Yes, I agree that this was worse than the George Floyd's death. 9/11 is the more appropiate comparison, but I think it shows precisely why this "mass psychosis" is something wrong that should be checked. Sure, when we were bands of 30-50 tribesmen, the largest consequence that was going to happen was another 30-50 tribesman dead. I think the pyschosis that followed after 9/11 prevented much clear thinking and led to a series of bad decisions of enormous consequences that did not help the problem. Even if you don't care about the massive number of dead civilians in Iraq, America spent a lot of money and resources there, all for nothing (they never did end up having the WMDs). Congress passed the Patriot Act granting intelligence agencies massive powers, created the TSA, etc, and it's unclear whether any of these massive infringement of liberties and waste of resources had any benefits. My point is, this sort of stifiling of discussion, regardless of how "justified" it is, leads to incredibly bad decisions because it silences all possible critique.

Also of note, mild dissidence isn't resulting in massive condemnation, it's approval of Hamas that's getting that retort.

Some of the Squad have tried both-sidesism, and the Biden administration called them disgraceful and repugnant.

I think the US domestic politics of this is going to be totally blown up now Trump has called Hezbollah "smart". I assume it was a gaffe, but Trump being Trump he isn't going to walk it back. Absent the Trump gaffe, it would have been an obvious good partisan move for the right to keep pointing at suitable targets at the left and complaining they hadn't denounced Hamas loudly enough (whether or not it was true).

I don't think both-sidesism is mild dissidence. I vigorously object to the idea that there is symmetry between the two sides of this conflict. We can see this pretty clearly and easily by noting the use of human shields by Hamas and then imagining how effective such a strategy would be for Israelis. Talaib said:

“I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day. I am determined as ever to fight for a just future where everyone can live in peace, without fear and with true freedom, equal rights, and human dignity.”

Maybe it's not of the "we need a thousand Floyds" variety, but it's of the "well, he did have it coming though" variety. Seriously, imagine issuing a statement the day after the Floyd killing that said, "I grieve the deaths of both black people and police officers". OK, you can do that, but feeling the need to stipulate it in that moment makes it pretty clear what someone thinks about it.

then imagining how effective such a strategy would be for Israelis.

Why imagine? There's documented claims of the Israelis using Palestinians as human shields for years, so they clearly think there's something to the tactic.

People who are skeptical of certain aspects and express that skepticism of the narrative (the beheaded babies) are screencapped and shared as 'the worst people'. Does this remind anyone of what happened to those who were simply skeptical of the narrative that American police were on some racist killing spree, and demanded to see harder evidence?

Can you link to this? I certainly haven't seen it. I have seen plenty of frog accounts expressing skepticism of the specific "beheading babies" narrative and basically no criticism of that skepticism. Of course most of the skepticism also comes with "what they filmed themselves doing is enough, kill them all regardless."

That's an important distinction between the current situation and BLM. Cops aren't going house by house, shooting old black ladies and rap music enjoyers, then posting videos of their deaths to their own facebook so their friends and relatives can watch. For the most part, bodycam footage shows Adam Toledo/Makia Bryant/Ricardo Munoz type situations of cops killing a criminal when interrupting a violent crime. So when you post bodycam footage and crime stats, you completely destroy the BLM narrative.

That's why the left attacks you for skepticism - it's all they can do. Making the case based on facts isn't really possible. In contrast, the right mostly attacks you for posting celebratory photos of Palestinian paragliders or saying that Israeli music enjoyers deserved it for being too close to Gaza.

https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/Screen-Shot-2023-10-10-at-81118-PM.jpg

Most of it is: BLMGNF.

  1. Cops being trigger happy scared and genuinely believing that a wallet was a gun.

  2. The odd piece of shit pig like Michael Slager that guns down a fleeing suspect.

  3. What you might call criminal negligence, like the cop that thought her gun was actually her Taser and shot a suspect...this, to my mind, is not all that different than if she had run a stop sign and killed the suspect with her cruiser.

BLM seems to be...at ground level, a lot of very passionate, committed activists. With leadership, at least with BLMGNF, they're a bunch of greedy pigs milking these passionate, devoted foot soldiers for all that they're worth.

if Natives had done a similar attacks on Americans, they would have supported it, even if they had been a victim

This person is showing ideological consistency. Also they are a moral monster. If American Indians shot and raped music festival goers by the hundreds that would be wrong, regardless of the concert goers "colonizer" status.

This person is so wrong I'm wondering if that is the truth in their heart or instead a luxury belief used to signal their ideological commitment.

I think it's worth pointing out that the right is far from united on this. And in fact these events are so complex that I've seen any number of perspectives on them.

You are right to say that people are unhinged about this (on both sides I might add) but to characterize this as a Floyd moment is inaccurate. There is no falling in line of everyone behind a single narrative.

I guess it remains to be seen whether everyone will. The BLM conversation had been in the air for a while, activists had been festering resentment torwards the police for a while, and they were poised to strike when the George Floyd video was released. The Israel-Palestine issue, I think, had been out of the American mind for a while, but there does seem to be a massive and hard push towards consensus-building. You're right that it might not end up being a 'George Floyd' moment if that consensus is not reached, but when I am referring to it as a George Floyd moment, I am referring to the tactics and dynamics.

If you just mean that it's one of those events where the heaviest tools of propaganda and consensus building are deployed then it's inarguable. Israel is squarely the next Current Thing.

If you'll pardon my frankness, it's mostly just the Jews on the Right. And the neocon warmongers. So yes, a good portion of the vocal Right.

I would also be cut up if something sudden and shockingly terrible happened to my homeland and they have a way stronger affinity for theirs' than I do. I'd also be a stark raving lunatic on tv calling for blood if I were a defense contractor bitch (eg Lindsey Graham)

Politimath is another good example of someone who is usually a fairly stoic data guy but has devolved into manic 'oh the humanity' posting

It was always going to happen. You can't build the cancel-culture machine, use it against a group so voraciously that they learn every detail about how it works, and then expect them not to use it in retribution when they have the opportunity. Expect this sort of dynamic to be the primary feature in the culture war in years to come.

The ABC's called it: the Australian referendum to enshrine special Aboriginal representation in the Constitution has utterly failed. They needed a majority nationally and a majority in four of the six states; they've gotten at last count 41% (possibly less; pre-polls are counted last, and while I wasn't expecting it they seem to have more No than the on-the-day vote) of the national vote and have lost in all six of the states (again, I was expecting Tasmania and/or Victoria to buck the trend - Victoria being the most urbanised Australian state, with 75% of its population in the state capital of Melbourne, and Tasmania having a long tradition of hippie-ism and being the birthplace of the Greens; they were also polling the highest Yes).

Most of the Yes campaigners - at least, those the ABC talked to - seem to be going with the line of "the No campaign was misinformation and this doesn't count because they were tricked"*. That's wrong (there were a few people with crazy ideas, of course, but for the most part what the SJers are decrying as "misinformation" is true or plausible), but it's at least wrong about a dry fact and not nearly as divisive as going "this proves Australia's a racist country".

The result does seem to have emboldened people to actually stand up against SJ; Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was very hesitant to go with No (though he eventually did), but in his speech upon hearing the result he specifically said that this result was Australians rejecting activists' claims.

At-least-partial credit to @OliveTapenade, who said:

If No wins, I think it will be taken as evidence that the Australian people are deeply racist and ignorant (hence the need for Truth)

...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".

*NB: this doesn't, for the moment, include Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; all he's said on the matter of "why No" IIRC is that referenda never succeed without bipartisan support.

The issue with aboriginals is that the urban population is full of whites with distant aboriginal ancestry (almost uniformly 75%+ European) using their newfound (they certainly wouldn’t have considered themselves aboriginal in 1973) identities for the usual grievances / racial spoils, and the rural population, where almost all aboriginal Australians who are half or more native live, deals with the same problems as every indigenous community from Greenland to Hawaii (principally alcoholism, drugs and - a less charitable commentator would say - fecklessness).

The problem is that modernity is unavoidable (especially in the developed world) and so when presented with the choice of continuing their harsh, strenuous pre-modern existence (as much as that might even be possible) or living off welfare and getting drunk all day, they pick the latter. It’s sad that visitors can no longer go to an Indian reservation and - outside of certain exhibits - witness the natives living in tipis and wearing carefully sewn native fabrics and headdresses and whatever, but let’s be real, that takes a lot of work compared to buying $2 t shirts made in Bangladesh. And, in defense of the natives, there are plenty of Europeans who similarly live off welfare and spend their days drunk or high, too.

Really, though, the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above, occupying our time in what will probably be ways no less degenerate than the average dweller in an aboriginal settlement somewhere in the northern territories.

the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above

It's worth considering that the rickety, shitey-arse state of many reservations etc. is as much the result of incompetence, indifference and bad faith from conquerors, as it is the inherent fecklessness of indigenes. Perhaps a hyper-competent, hyper-intelligent robot overlord would simply provide a better standard of reservation.

Competently-administed mandatory eudaimonia would actually be a wise policy on the part of any hypothetical roboking that was disinclined towards genocidal eradication. To keep humans in a sub-par state of flourishing would mean less predictability - there's always the chance of some freak behaving who-knows-how. Having all the decorative/ethically-sourced humans in a state that is the absolute pinnacle of human excellence means you can plan accordingly, and the odd freak won't "hop the fence" so to speak.

Even that practical concern aside, I think an AI inclined to keep us would probably keep us well. And for the humans, this is a life at least as fulfilling as that experienced by all the chaps in the old testament, in Greek myth, etc - a life of challenge, overseen by known gods. Not too bad really.

I kinda disagree that the conquers were negligent. I think that humans without a purpose, who have everything handed to them end up in a state rather like zoo animals. They no longer need those behaviors that produce flourishing in the wild state, so they no longer really do them. The6 become essentially domesticated in the sense that they simply expect things to be handed to them rather than going out and getting them, and expect the keepers to maintain and build their life for them.

That might explain why the aboriginals use substances instead of working(at least partially; I doubt there are many jobs to be had near the reservations), but the squalor of their conditions is because the Australian government herded them into the middle of nowhere, in one of the least densely populated countries in the world, and proceeded to provide squalid conditions instead of nice ones.

It might be unrealistic to expect government housing for an entire ethnic group to be nice middle class suburbs, but ‘it sucks because they ruined it for want of something to do’ requires evidence that they did in fact ruin it instead of it just being cruddy to begin with.

Having lived in Darwin for a while, there was an essentially never-ending loop of 'Nice new accommodation is built for local indigenous, indigenous move in, Indigenous culture around extreme sharing within groups and territorial violence between groups leads to nice new accomodation becoming teeming slum, nice new accomodation is built'

Not negligent per se; let's just say they didn't sincerely prioritise the flourishing of those they hadn't the heart to murder.

Suppose for example I'm the governor of some territory with a load of indigenes and colonists. Even if I set aside a physical space for the indigenes and make some financial allowance for basic medical treatment and what-have-you, there just aren't enough men or dollars or hours in the day to really ensure the indigenes' flourishing.

An AI will only be able to conquer and master humanity if it is significantly more capable than us. Consider how we might expect, say, a mediaeval army versus a modern polity to care for spare people in their charge. Now consider than any humanity-beating AI would be far more competent than a modern state, and by a much greater degree than the modern state outclasses some mediaeval horde.

I think an AI good enough to beat us could also husband us well without breaking a sweat.

I don't think it's true that a purposeless life need be as squalid as those of many modern indigenes - many perfectly nice and even quite good lives don't have any purpose that's apparent to their possessors. And honestly, life in divine obedience to a real machine God seems at least as purposeful as any of the religions of the book. I reckon it would beat "modern hedonistic self-actualisation" too.

I didn’t say that, I think the purposeless people in those conditions, no matter how “nice” you make them or how “well kept” they are will eventually turn even a middle class suburb condition into a shithole given enough time. Humans simply are not built for idleness, no animals are. And animals unable to act upon their instincts fend to have mental issues and end up creating worse conditions.

Right, so the AI creates busywork for humanity.

It works for dogs. Dogs that have jobs even if it’s just competitive frisbee or obstacle courses or herding tend to be better adjusted than pets left at home.

Sorry, that was a failure to convey tone correctly on my part - I agree with the busywork proposal, I wasn't being facetious. Perhaps some holy commandments like an obligation to pray x number of times per day etc

I have to wonder if this is going to end up like Irish referenda on social liberalisation (e.g. divorce); the pro- side argue each time that the loss doesn't represent the true views of the country, that there was misinformation and fear mongering and outside interference, and they're going to go again. Then eventually after a series of votes, where they finally get "yes" by a very slim majority - that's it. The people have spoken. No more referenda, this is now the law of the land, sorry "No" side you had your chance and don't get another chance to campaign (unlike us who got three or four goes to get the result we wanted).

I will be interested if the pro-Voice side push for another vote down the line in X months/year's time.

Ultimately this is always the nature of the game with progressive causes; opposing them requires constant vigilance and to win every single conflict, while they only require one (quite possibly gamed and/or cheated) win, and then that's it, the ratchet has advanced and never shall it relent. Anyone who tries to roll things back is painted as a vile fascist dictator trying to remove 'human rights' (that didn't exist until 5 seconds ago).

This is possibly why the Supreme Court abortion thing hit progressives so hard, because this is never supposed to happen.

This is possibly why the Supreme Court abortion thing hit progressives so hard, because this is never supposed to happen.

And why pro-life pregnancy centers receive so much ire. They are not exactly neutral institutions, but the vast majority of the things they do seem to be genuinely charitable(eg providing diapers to poor mothers), whether or not you think the state should be subsidizing them. It’s simply that pretending partisan advocacy NGO’s are just basic charity organizations and the only reason to ever oppose them is because you’re evil and hate whatever charitable work they supposedly do is only supposed to work in one direction.

Honestly I don't believe this entirely. The issue of try-try-try again-pass is real yes, but as Brexit shows it's an advantage inherent to the "Anti-Status-Quo" stance rather than inherently an advantage for progressives.

The problem is that conservatives believe you can just rest on your laurels and do nothing whatsoever to uphold your beliefs beyond voting, while progressives understand that to win you have to fight for your beliefs every single day. If conservatives tried half as hard to ban gay marriage as the progressives did to legalize it, it would be illegal.

Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals, have numerous people whose entire lives and careers are dedicated to furthering the cause (many of whom abandoned more profitable avenues to do so) and have millions more who make art, put the values into their work, make public displays of loyalty, etc. Conservatives aren't even in the same ballpark of effort and commitment.

The sole exception would of course be Christian Evangelicals, who do all the same things progressives do to to actually attempt to win. And would you look at that, they did in fact get Roe v Wade overturned! Turns out conservatives can win if they actually care and put their money where their mouth is!

Progressives collectively throw hundreds of billions of dollars towards their social goals

They can do this because it's other people's money. They've infiltrated corporate and government institutions and act as corrupt agents, turning them towards the goals of the left instead of the nominal goals of the organization.

Currently that is the case, and my only response is "Yes, and if Conservatives cared enough they'd be stealing our money to fund pet causes too."

But it wasn't always true. The early progressive movements were largely funded by progressives, progressive sympathizers, and donations by those who supported the associated causes. Conservatives could do the same, but they don't. An expected counterpoint would be the funds seized from the trucker protest but 1. That's not America, and 2. You have to actually put money towards building power structures (like the Federalist Society), not just in response to a single politically hot event.

The progressives aren't about to let the conservatives pull the same trick; now that they've done it, they've closed the door to conservatives doing it. Progressive organizations get to engage in conspiracies in restraint of trade with no one blinking an eye. Conservative organizations get the stink-eye from the IRS.

I don't entirely disagree with this, though I would say it occurred largely because conservatives didn't care enough about their own values to maintain them. They could have done what progressives are doing now, but failed to do so, and instead let sinful behavior take control of the most powerful state to ever exist.

The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming. It is a war after all. You can't just reuse the old methods identically, but there are consistently functional principles that are timeless.

It is a war after all.

Sometimes the enemy just outclasses you.

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The solution now is to find new tricks, new takeover methods, that the opponent doesn't see coming.

And if no such things exist to be found?

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What I'm trying to get at is that "well this vote shows the people do/don't want this thing" only applies to the "anti-" side of any proposal after the "pro" side get their victory. I understand this tactic, but I don't see how you can shift from "we don't agree with this result so we'll keep going till we get the one we want", to "this result is now written in stone and can never be challenged". Unless you don't care a whit about the charge of hypocrisy and can be certain the tame media will never apply it to you, but always and only to your opponents.

That's my takeaway on the whole abortion debate: "why can't both sides compromise?" Well, because for one side, 'compromise' means 'surrender your principles, give us what we want, but we won't give you anything in return'.

"Why don't you permit abortion for rape/incest/threat to life of mother?"

(1) You don't? Heartless monsters who hate women and want them to die! (2) You do? Okay, you've already given in on the permissibility of abortion, that means you have no principled objection, so why not give in on the other cases we want? If you don't, then you're a hypocrite!

"If you really thought abortion was murder, why aren't you bombing clinics/putting women who get abortions in jail/executing abortion doctors?"

(1) You don't? Ha ha, you hypocrites! So that means you're lying and you don't have any principled objection to abortion, you only hate women and want to punish them for their sexuality! (2) You do? You heartless monsters! You hate women and want to punish them for their sexuality!

Is that actually what happened in Ireland? Or did support for the pro side grow over time, and then continue to grow even after they won the referendum, making campaigning for a reversal pointless? Considering the 2019 referendum to further reduce divorce requirements was a blowout with over 80% approval, I somehow don't see a reversal of the 1995 referendum as likely to win more than 10% of the vote.

My point is less about "did support grow" (yes, like the rest of the world, we were not unaffected by 'whiskey! democracy! sexy!') but that the side advocating for the change insisted after every reversal that they weren't going to stop campaigning until they got the result they wanted, and when they did get it, suddenly now no further votes were needed or wanted. Following figures pulled out of my backside but 'We lost by 60% to 40%, the struggle is not over" until "We won by 51% to 49%, that's it, this is now immutable unchangeable law and we don't need any further votes on this, and the No campaign can just go away".

That's in part why I am so rigid on "not an inch"; after abortion was legalised (to a limited extent in my country) all the public appeal about "well this is only for really hard cases and it will be limited and no it's not going to lead to abortion on demand" was dropped and the activist groups were quite clear, and publicly said so, "This is only the first step, we're going to continue until we get the liberalised abortion we want".

There is never any 'we only want this one small concession, why are you being so inhumane and heartless?'.

Which referenda are you thinking of? Gay marriage passed in 2015 with a healthy majority (there was only one county in which the No vote achieved a majority), and abortion passed in a landslide in 2018.

Not to dispute the existence of the phenomenon you're describing. My uncle lives in the UK and is every inch the archetypal Guardian reader. He's been insisting for the last seven years that the Brexit referendum was illegitimate because of Russian interference/"misinformation"/whatever you're having yourself. Although I think the prospect of the UK campaigning to rejoin the EU is effectively nil.

Gay marriage passed in 2015 with a healthy majority

Yeah, and both major parties supported it, which is a huge sea change in public opinion within my own lifetime. So the constant 'we are an oppressed minority living in a church-run society which is bigoted against us' script is quite plainly untrue, yet it keeps being pulled out whenever new changes are proposed.

Could not agree more.

Albanese's said he respects the result and the will of the people; he's not going to try it again this term (trying it again would also pretty much guarantee that that 60% would vote against him come the next election, and I don't think he's that stupid).

Down the track, who knows. Do note that Australia is TTBOMK the only country to repeal a carbon tax, so our right does actually roll things back from time to time (even if I might not agree with that particular rollback).

Do note that Australia is TTBOMK the only country to repeal a carbon tax, so our right does actually roll things back from time to time (even if I might not agree with that particular rollback).

I'm one of the more lunatic environmentalists on this site and I even supported rolling back the carbon tax. The carbon tax doesn't do anything to actually slow down the burning of carbon in any real way, it just gives a bunch of extremely rich people the ability to play financial games and suck some money from the public teat.

I think the Voice proposal is dead. It was a shitty idea, pushed more for "something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it" reasons than genuine conviction I think. There will continue to be efforts to get treaties or whatever other idea comes along, but that's it for the Voice.

For comparison, the rejected Republic referendum back in the 90s really did kill the Republican movement. Even 25 years later, with the Queen having passed away, there is still no heat or energy behind the idea of getting rid of the monarchy.

I don't know if it was actually going to be called "the Voice" or if that was just a placeholder name, but it's so comically ominous. "There will be a Voice!" "We must consult the Voice!" "What will the Voice say?". Like something out of a Lovecraft story with a cult and an Old One.

I assumed the Yes campaign's insistence that the Voice would have no legal force was just a bad-faith position, as it's fairly easy to conceive of a dynamic where the Voice doesn't need legal force because it has the liberal media waiting to brand any government's disregard of the Voice as ipso facto evidence of racism, which will be used to declare that government's positions as morally illegitimate. When your enemy is campaigning to build a new weapon, don't vote to give it to him.

I don't know if it was actually going to be called "the Voice" or if that was just a placeholder name

Definitely "Voice". Let me quote the actual text of the proposed amendment:

There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

The term "Voice" is lifted from the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The word choice may have something to do with the significantly-aberrant Aboriginal use of English.

the Voice would have no legal force

Apparently I haven't been following this closely enough. Why were they bothering to have a referendum then?

As far as I can tell (from the full text quoted below), they don't actually have any power that a random Australian citizen lacks. Some guy could put together a club with his buddies, give it a fancy name, and carry out the same practices, create the same reports, and talk to the same people as the proposed "Voice".

Is there anything to it beyond a constitutionally-enshrined lobby group?

There was sort of this weird rhetorical loop between 'The Voice is a symbolic powerless body with no legal force' and 'The Voice will action real meaningful change due to its power' in which the former is probably more accurate but it never got firmly nailed down.

The lack of clarity around this is part of the reason it lost so badly. At least on the center and right there's also been some perception of the Voice as a possible Trojan Horse where in a few years a left wing government could give Aborigines a veto (or something less dramatic but still disruptive) and the High Court would shrug and say "Well, the constitution says Aborigines have a 'Voice', that could mean anything, so this is constitutional".

The constitution would require that the Voice 1) exist, though its specific form and powers would be up to parliament, and 2) be permitted to make representations to parliament and executive government. So it would be required to have access to government in a way that a random club would not.

That said, yes, beyond that it is toothless. There would have been no requirement for the government to take its advice in any way, and parliament would have the ability to disband, reform, or reconstitute the Voice at will.

It would probably have just been a publicly-funded indigenous lobby group in parliament. If it had passed I very much doubt it would have changed anything of note.

The constitutional amendment would have been:

Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice

In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia:

  1. There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

  2. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

  3. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

So, yes, it would have been called the Voice.

Considering that the voice's powers would have been whatever parliament decided they would be, "it would have no legal force" is a facile claim.

Well, it was an exciting night.

It was a very solid result. Antony Green called it at 7:24 PM AEST, only 84 minutes after polls closed in the eastern states. Polls were still open in WA at the time the result was known. I'd say this is about the best result No could have hoped for - they crested 60% nationally, and achieved a full, six-state sweep. That's about the same margin of victory that same-sex marriage had back in 2017, except this was more difficult. SSM was a plebiscite (i.e. optional voting), not compulsory voting like this referendum, and SSM was overwhelmingly supported by media, government, academia, and so on. For No to achieve the same margin of victory with the entire population, and going against the will of the elite blob, is very impressive.

I'd like to suggest, though, that the No campaign not take too much credit for it. There are now Yes leaders specifically blaming the No campaign for the result - Marcia Langton is predictably blaming disinformation - but I'm not sure that's accurate. Even leaving aside that, as you correctly note, the refrain of "misinformation!" was itself sufficiently questionable, some might even say dishonest, as to qualify as misinformation, we have to reckon with the relative lack of power and reach of the No campaign.

Anecdotally - I'm from a Victorian electorate that went No with around a 53-47 margin. Yet the No campaign had almost no public presence here. Yes yard signs were relatively common. I visited two different polling booths on the day, and both had Yes signage and highly engaged Yes campaigners handing out flyers, but no No campaigners. Businesses put up large Yes signs in their windows and by their doors, but there was no equivalent for No. The Voice campaigns, on both institutional and grassroots levels, may be examples of Hanania's theory about cardinal preferences. For better or for worse, the Yes campaign seemed more organised and had a louder voice.

To step beyond the anecdotal for a second, just glancing at the endorsements is striking - Yes had so many more endorsements, including five out of six state premiers, a huge number of professional associations, pretty much every sporting club, all the big banks, almost every religious institution and charity, even the grocery stores. Financially, in terms of ad spend, Yes spent far more money than No did. Given the relative weakness of the No campaign compared to Yes, if the conclusion is indeed that Yes failed to get their message across in the face of opposition, then Yes must have been punching considerably under their weight.

Money aside, the No campaign does strike me as having been more effective than Yes, though. They were running a 'fear and uncertainty' strategy, but that was probably the right call for them. People vote No for a huge number of different reasons, and No doesn't need a one-size-fits-all argument. In general, however, they found a few central arguments (the Voice will divide Australians on the basis of race; the Voice is a vehicle for radical activists; the Voice is expensive and wasteful; the Voice is legally risky) and pushed them clearly enough. The No cause, if not the campaign, also did a good job presenting Aboriginal people themselves as harbouring legitimate differences of view about this. Remember that most Australians do not see or interact with Aboriginal people on a regular basis, so probably most people's image of Aboriginals is coming from media representation. The fact that this referendum made us all familiar with prominent Aboriginals in every camp - Conservative Nos like Jacinta Price or Warren Mundine, Progressive Nos like Lidia Thorpe or Michael Mansell, and Yeses like Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson, or Thomas Mayo - effectively disarmed the Yes campaign line that "this is what Aboriginal people asked for". (Even on polling day I saw Yes placards touting the claim that 80% of Aboriginal people support Yes - a figure that was known to be false at the time.)

The Yes campaign, on the other hand, badly struggled to make its case. I feel that one of its major issues was the inability to imagine the mindset of someone who disagrees or has doubts, and they often resorted to clichés. "If you listen to people you get better outcomes" is so generic as to be uncontroversial, but it doesn't speak to why a constitutionally-enshrined Voice is necessary for that. In other cases I felt they never quite reached the point - they argued that it should be constitutionally-enshrined so that governments can't get rid of it, but given that bodies like ATSIC were abolished with bipartisan support, it seems as though there might have been popular support for abolishing past bodies that failed. It's not clear why we should want to give up the power to abolish a body if it isn't working.

In other places I feel they fell for the fact-checker's fallacy - that if you can quibble the factual accuracy of a statement, that's somehow going to win an argument. I've talked about the way the argument went around race before - if you're responding to someone worried that it's wrong to divide Australians on the basis of something they can't control, like their race or their ancestral background, nitpicking "indigeneity is different to race" or "the word 'race' is already in the constitution" is going to be ineffective.

But overall I feel their biggest failure was, in a sense, typical-minding the entire country. It's understandable that Yes supporters have positive affect around the idea of Yes, but obviously other people don't, so appeals to moral righteousness or attempts to guilt-trip people aren't going to be effective. Take statements like this - McManus and Albanese ask for Australians to be 'decent', to 'show what a wonderful country this is', to 'show kindness', to show 'generosity of spirit', and so on. But anybody who believes that voting Yes is the decent, kind, or generous thing to do is already a Yes voter! You have to win over people who don't believe that! Anecdotally I had Yes-supporting friends telling me things like, "Ask yourself the old question, what would Jesus do?", apparently seeing it as obvious that that leads to a Yes vote. But it doesn't.

This is a refrain I make a lot of the time, but things are not obvious. I think the Yes campaign thought that Yes was obvious. But it wasn't.

Anecdotally I had Yes-supporting friends telling me things like, "Ask yourself the old question, what would Jesus do?"

Do you mind if I ask if your friends were actually Christian themselves? I'm try to gauge how common these sorts of arguments are made by the agnostic and atheist.

The person who told me that specifically was an old family friend who I'm close to via church. She's the local organist, and I sometimes preach and lead worship. So we're both Christians. That said, she is an extremely progressive Christian, whereas I'm more traditional, so we do have our theological disagreements. It would probably be fair to call her a churchgoing agnostic.

Thanks for this detail.

Most people irl who say things like that are at least nominally Christian, although often not true believers. It’s only on the internet that there’s an epidemic of atheists using that argument for spurious reasons.

Polls were still open in WA at the time the result was known.

My understanding is that this would be a bit like calling a US presidential election for the democrats when California hadn’t finished counting; California/WA has such predictable partisanship that you don’t really have to actually check.

It's not exactly like that - they didn't assume anything about what the WA result would be.

To pass, the referendum needed a 'double majority'. That means both a national popular majority (i.e. over 50% of all voters nationwide) and a majority of states (i.e. at least four of the six states need to vote over 50% in favour).

Polls closed at 6 PM in the eastern states, and results started coming in quickly. Tasmania and New South Wales were both rapidly called for No, and then South Australia was called for No shortly after. By that point, three states had voted No, which made it impossible for a majority of states to vote Yes. At that point even if literally every single voter in WA voted Yes, it would not have made a difference.

I don't disagree, particularly, on the No campaign per se, although I don't know all that much about it since my main source is the ABC which didn't want to talk about it very much (I suppose that's evidence in its own right). On the other hand, there are two people who I'd say do get quite a lot of the credit (or the blame, I suppose, depending on your allegiance) - Pauline Hanson and Peter Dutton. Hanson and One Nation did the hard work of being the first to say "no", which started an honest-to-God respectability cascade, and Dutton's JAQ and insistence on the booklets were masterful. I'm not saying I endorse Dutton's strategy - more Machiavellian than I'd like - but it was very effective (looking at the polling shows a pretty-clear effect from the booklets).

I think Jacinta Price did more than anyone. The fact that she was against it so strongly and so early, was able to articulate the reasons why so well, and was visibly Aboriginal herself was in my view a major factor in getting the Nationals and then the Liberals to commit to a No position.

One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were. Over the course of the campaign I saw ads and billboards and people handing out pamphlets and even a choir promoting the Yes case. In comparison I saw exactly one (1) bumper sticker for No and nothing else. At the polling booth there were half a dozen volunteers for Yes and the whole fence was blanketed with their signage while No had one guy with one sign. And I've heard there were other polling places that didn't even have that.

I really wish people would learn that all this campaign paraphernalia is completely worthless, and arguably counterproductive. It was extremely clear the people with money and power wanted a Yes victory, but that doesn't actually convince anyone.

The proposal was the result of starting with the idea of putting Aboriginals in the constitution and then jerry-rigging it into an advisory body after people complained that they wanted something practical, but also trying not to do anything concrete or specific that could offend someone. It was a mess of an idea and really someone should have had the balls to stop this process before it got to this point instead of shunting off the responsibility of putting it down to the voting public.

I don't feel any joy in this result, though it's the outcome I voted for. We've had a bunch of angst and drama for no gain, and it seems clear no one is going to learn anything from the experience. All the talking heads are busy convincing themselves that the problem is somehow the sales job and not the product. No one is even thinking to ask if maybe it just wasn't a bit implausible that you needed a constitutional amendment to create an advisory committee, or that an advisory committee was going to somehow fix all the massive problems Aboriginal Australia faces. Maybe we just need to lecture people not to be racist harder next time. Yeah, that'll work.

One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were.

The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.

It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.

Are we sure this is not due to some Russian trickery with the elections?

As we know, it's not real democracy if the people vote for the opposite of what the establishment want them to.

Surely Trump/MAGA/QAnon must be involved somehow! 😀

The Sydney Morning Herald helpfully reports:

Anti-Voice rallies organised by pro-Putin conspiracy theorist

Putin strikes again.

I wish I was ten percent as competent as the left believes Putin is.

I wish I was ten percent as competent as the left believes Putin is.

So does Putin.

and simply don't care to listen to them.

Well, why should they listen to the opinions of a mass of inferior peasants, if they "really believe" those opinions are driven by stupidity and racism? If you have power, why not enforce the objectively correct and moral position over the objections of the ignorant and the wicked?

The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board. It may be fashionable to dehumanise your outgroup and form representations of them as evil and stupid that justify not listening to them or trying to sympathise with their concerns. But the reality is that if you fail to try and properly understand the rest of the country, and form caricatures of them that simply do not align with how they really think and act, you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.

The entire Yes campaign has seemed to believe that the morality of an indigenous Voice is so self-evident that they don't even need to try and form much of a coherent argument in favour of why it's a good decision (well, outside of empty sympathy-mongering, sloganeering and other such tactics that attempt to substitute actual argument for emotional appeal, I believe @OliveTapenade has covered that topic in detail in this thread and in previous ones too).

One of the main arguments I see in favour of the Voice is that Indigenous outcomes are poor, it's the fault of whites and therefore Something Needs To Be Done. But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help? It's also unclear why providing help even requires any amount of differential treatment based on race at all (if the Indigenous are disproportionately poor, any policy focusing on socioeconomic status instead of ethnicity will also disproportionately help the Indigenous while also not neglecting other Australians in need). The woke arguments simply have not addressed these issues and do not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. Regurgitating empty platitudes about "listening to people affected" are not arguments, they are slogans, and not particularly convincing ones either.

The reality is that it's not as clear cut as they think, and their failure to make sensible arguments in favour of the policy or properly acknowledge the arguments of their opponents drives home to people just how intellectually vacuous the argument in favour of the proposal is and has always been. It really seems like Yes just can't conceive of reasons why one would vote No, and instead of actually dealing with the core-level issues inherent to the proposal they are supporting it mainly on vibes alone.

This is what I mean when I say they have "hugely lost touch with the rest of the country". Of course, I won't interrupt my enemies in the middle of making a mistake.

But even accepting the premise that the Indigenous deserve something, it doesn't answer the question of why what they deserve is a constitutionally mandated lobbying group that exists to promote their interests and their interests alone (especially considering the failure of ATSIC to solve these problems and how it became a corrupt, mismanaged fuckfest). Australia pumps lots of money into Indigenous causes all the time, does this not already constitute help?

The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."

If you suggest that a legislated Voice would do, the reply is to note that the Uluru Statement asks for 'a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution'. To counter with any other suggestion would be patronising and even racist, whitefellas once again failing to listen and telling Aboriginals what's good for them.

You might ask the question whether or not the Uluru Statement actually reflects the desires of most indigenous people. You might also argue that democracy is inherently a process of deliberation and compromise between different interest groups and there is nothing clearly racist about replying to a suggestion with, "We don't think that's practical at the time, but here are some alternatives that meet you halfway." However, I think the Yes campaign was very hung up on the idea that this is definitely the one thing that Aboriginal people asked for, and that it is so fundamentally reasonable that no one could possibly object to it. Both those ideas seem blinkered to me.

Ironically, at the time in 2017, Malcolm Turnbull's response was to say that "the government does not believe such a radical change to our constitution’s representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians in a majority of states". Despite being roundly criticised for that at the time, six years on it appears that he was entirely correct. Perhaps the drafters of the Uluru Statement might have done better to do some listening of their own, and consider what Turnbull - a sympathetic politician - was telling them was practically possible.

The standard reply to this was, "This is what they asked for."

I'd add that what people deserve is a matter that is able to be litigated, not a matter that is unilaterally decided by the beneficiary and that everyone else is obligated to blindly agree with. Making "what people asked for" the basis for one's reasoning is untenable, as even in a situation where someone has been wronged and everyone agrees they deserve compensation there are indeed requests that can be made which are unreasonable or disproportionate or just plain impractical. Just because you deserve something doesn't necessarily mean you deserve to get what you want. And these are holes that can be poked even after one has assumed that the progressive framing of poor Indigenous outcomes is correct, and I don't.

it doesn't help get people on board.

…

you're almost certainly not going to be able to convince them nor will you be able to convert people to be in favour of your policy proposals.

So what? So long as you have your fellow elites on board, you can just use your power as elites to force what you want on the powerless peasant masses. You don't need to "convince" or "convert" the peasant masses, just find ways to punish them for being ignorant bigots and voting wrong until enough of them eventually vote your way — assuming that, as it seems to be in this case, that you can't just impose your goals through the permanent bureaucracy, courts, academic consensus, or other such powerful institutions more insulated from democratic feedback.

"Democracy" is, and always has been, more of a sham than a reality. Society is always ruled by a small elite, and that elite always ends up getting their way, and the masses are pretty much always just powerless peasants who can do nothing but submit. Why should lords, with their superior breeding and wisdom, bother to listen to the ignorant opinions of dirty, stupid peasants, as opposed to just whipping the low-born curs into compliance?

So long as you have your fellow elites on board, you can just use your power as elites to force what you want on the powerless peasant masses.

Probably the wrong time to be making this claim, seeing as the powerless peasant masses just beat the elites handily.

The issue is that this kind of rhetoric and behaviour only really helps you gain status within a peer group that already agrees with you, it doesn't help get people on board.

Does the evidence pan out there? The impulse to avoid shame and being seen as part of a low-status group seems quite strong (e.g. I'd consider it the finisher of old school internet atheism, "in this moment, I'm ecstatic" or how that one went), and I don't know if the current Moral Majority was ever particularly more conciliatory on the path to its present degree of mass support. (If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties!)

A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.

If you do accept them as the descendants of the hippies of yore, they were already calling their outgroup fascists back in the late sixties

I remember once watching a rerun of an episode of Dragnet — which ran back in the 50s — with a couple of proto-hippy California college students calling Joe Friday a "fascist pig."

A lot probably depends on how many members of their remaining opposition still subscribe to their status hierarchy, and either side has a correct feel for this figure.

Or how many notables among their remaining opposition can be subjected to sufficient negative consequences as to make others among the opposition switch sides out of fear of the same — "Kill the chicken to scare the monkey" and such.

It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them.

From the descriptions of the amount of resources thrown behind the yes campaign(eg people handing out fliers in train stations for days) it almost sounds more like it was people who don’t have day jobs.

...Australia allows campaigning at the polling place? That's an absolute no-no in Finland, you can't even walk in to vote wearing your preferred candidate's pin.

There's a 6 metre buffer zone outside the actual school hall/whatever that is being used as a polling place. So it's routine to run a gauntlet of campaigners trying to shove paper in your hand as you walk through the gate. It annoys a lot of people.

There's an old Chaser sketch exploring different ways to try to get through unscathed.

Only six meters? In Texas the electioneering exclusion zone is the same as the exclusion zone for guns, and people are regularly sent to the bathroom to turn political shirts inside out before being allowed to vote. Political action committees produce lists of endorsed candidates on unofficial letterhead(that is it doesn’t say ‘vote for real true conservatives’) so they can be carried into the polling booth.

Yeah, only six metres. And you're allowed to take party political material in with you - it's routine for parties to give out "how to vote" cards recommending an ordering of candidates (e.g. us first, our allies second, weirdos and fringe candidates in the middle, and our enemies at the bottom) to voters walking in.

(I know you specifically don't need to know this, but for non-Australians reading, I hope this is helpful.)

I'll add that the how-to-vote cards do have a practical function. Firstly, Australia's voting system is relatively complex compared to countries like the US, so having a little more advice on how to correctly fill out a ballot seems reasonable. Secondly, we have preferential voting, and one of the purposes of how-to-vote cards is to explain how the party would like you to vote.

Let me give a specific example - here's a Labor how-to-vote card for the 2015 Canning by-election. For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count. However, there are twelve candidates in Canning! Twelve! Is the average voter really going to research every one of them and rank them in order? The how-to-vote card tells you how the Labor Party would like you to rank all the candidates. If you already know you want to vote for Labor, why not follow their advice?

Canning is an extreme case - there usually aren't twelve candidates. But anecdotally, I find that in my electorate it is usually somewhere between five and seven, and that's still a lot. Thus every party gives out cards like this.

The better cards, in my opinion, also give a little bit of information on the candidate's or party's platform, but that's up to the party. Still, they do have a useful role in educating and streamlining the voting process.

That said one worthwhile sidenote is that because a lot of voters just follow the order that their preferred party says, the people who decide the orders on the how-to-vote cards can have a lot of influence - this is where so-called preference deals can have a big influence. Often the parties will negotiate with other behind the scenes a bit for their preferences, and it can have a significant impact.

Obviously none of this matters for a referendum, because there aren't any parties and a referendum is a straight Yes/No question, but it is an interesting quirk of the way the Australian electoral system works.

It is hilarious that preferential voting which was a Reddit fan favourite of 2010s and was surely going to herald true democracy…. ended up creating more backroom politics

It also succeeds at doing the thing it is meant to do - preventing vote-splitting from making third parties counterproductive.

E.g. the seat of Pumicestone in the 2017 Queensland election gave the most votes to the left wing Labor candidate (the amusingly named Michael Hoogwaerts), with 35%. The right wing vote was split between the Liberal National candidate with 30% and the even more right wing One Nation candidate with 23%.

FPTP would have given the seat to Labor, despite most voters voting for a right wing candidate. Instead, the Liberal National won it on preferences.

More comments

For what it's worth I do think preferential voting is superior to first-past-the-post, but you're right that it does not end or remove backroom deals. I don't believe there's any form of democracy, or even of government entirely, that's immune to scheming and dealing behind the scenes.

In this specific case, alternative vote (i.e. not requiring every box be filled) would be an alternative to Australia's mandatory full preferential voting that would significantly weaken the power of preference deals.

What’s the problem with it though. In effect some uninformed voters voluntarily hand their preferred parties the power of their residual votes to use as they see fit, along with the main one. If the voter himself says : ‘I’ve seen all I wanted to see, go to the backroom’, it’s not really backroom politics.

For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count.

Whoa really? Where I live there have been occasional rumblings about switching to preference voting, and I've mostly been agnostic about it. But this part seems like a negative, to me. If it's clear who someone meant to vote for, the vote should count.

I'm curious what the reasoning is here? Is this specific to Australia? Something to do with mandatory voting?

That's just how it works in Australia. To my knowledge, when preferential voting is proposed overseas, as in the UK Alternative Vote referendum in 2011, the proposal has been for optional-preferential voting, rather than our mandatory full-preferential system. Likewise I believe New York uses optional-preferential rather than full.

As to why that's the way it works here, I don't know specifically.

We adopted preferential voting with the Commnowealth Electoral Act of 1918, after WWI - the intent was that, since politics of the day were a relatively unified Labor Party which would likely win a plurality vote every time against a gaggle of competing alternative parties, preferential voting was necessary to ensure fair representation. In 1918 the Nationalists were in power, and there had just been a by-election which Labor won with only a third of the vote, against two conservative candidates who split each other's vote. Preferential voting was intended to prevent travesties like that. Naturally Labor opposed it at the time, but today both major parties are solidly behind it.

(Interestingly, the general dynamic of Australian politics still mostly holds today, in that Labor is consistently the biggest individual party, and it's opposed by a rough coalition of not-Labor parties, which today are called the Coalition. The general structure of Australian politics has been the interests of labour, represented by the Labor party, against the interests of capital, represented by the National/Country/United Australia/Liberal/Whatever party. That said, this might be changing as over the last few decades, Labor have been increasingly losing touch with their earlier working-class and union base, and both major parties are seeing their primary votes collapse, as voters leave the big parties for more ideological alternatives.)

Anyway, I don't know why we chose full-preferential voting in 1918. For better or for worse, we did, and no one seems to want to risk touching the electoral system today. So it's likely to stay.

(We did not have mandatory voting in 1918 - that was introduced in 1924, after the 1922 election only had 60% turnout, which at the time was considered extraordinarily low, and indeed too low to give the government a real mandate. I realise that sounds quaint now with countries like the United States usually showing sub-60 turnout - I guess it just goes to show what a different time it was.)

I use the how-to-vote cards to triangulate minor parties' and independents' positions based on the patterns of how major parties rank them. I'm a relatively-high-information voter as regards the major parties' positions (for 2022, once my single-issue-voting plan failed due to hearing crickets from all parties, I went through all the online platforms - or at least, four of them, since I seem to recall the UAP not even having one, and I don't think I checked the Nats since for some reason Bendigo gets Libs), but minor parties and independents are harder and I usually don't bother.

One thing I will note about preference deals is this: there used to be a cordon sanitaire against preference deals with One Nation (I recall the Libs putting One Nation last under Howard), but it collapsed and the Liberals now preference One Nation second.

We have ‘how to vote’ cards too, they’re just plain black and white with no letterheads or logos of a political party or advocacy group of any sort. It would be illegal to carry a flier into a poll booth but you can have a list to remind yourself.

I've been refreshing the counts for the past few hours, and this referendum failed even harder than I thought it was going to as well. 60% rejecting the proposal and losing all states is a pretty damning result for The Voice. I'm particularly surprised by Tasmania's rejection, because it was a state that Yes supporters were relying on to support the referendum, and surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes.

Something that Mundine stated in the aftermath of the referendum results did resonate with me quite heavily:

Warren Mundine, the leading no campaigner, has credited his side’s focusing on migrant communities for helping defeat the referendum.

Mundine spoke to Sky News, noting “some of them come from countries where they were second-class citizens” and were open to a message about the voice causing a divide.

We knew that the migrant community is 50% of Australia, either born overseas or their parents have been born overseas. We deliberately target that group.”

I'm the kind of migrant that has experienced this, and am incredibly opposed to affirmative action. Progressives might think their ideas are revolutionary and new, but their mindset of victimhood, group accountability and unequal racial treatment on that basis is basically endemic in many third-world countries, and many migrants have been on the wrong side of policies that look and quack a good amount like progressive politics.

As a result, I was in support of No from the very beginning, and though I couldn't vote in it I am happy with the outcome of the referendum. If the Voice had ended up with too much influence it would essentially have been a permanent, constitutionally mandated lobbying group which constituted an outright subversion of a proper and impartial democratic process, if it ended up with too little influence it would have basically been useless. Both would have warranted a No vote.

Agreed, the Aboriginal grievance industry is still very fixed in this idea of blackfellas vs whitefellas, and it's increasingly disconnected from the very immigrant-heavy multiethnic country that actually exists. Their messages just do not resonate with people who neither share their grudges nor feel any white guilt for their circumstances.

I fully expected it, but I'm still gratified to see No performing extremely strongly in areas with heavily non-Anglo demographics. A country like this can't work if people don't buy into the idea that race doesn't matter.

surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes

"Shy Tory" effect? If indicating you are thinking of voting "no" gets you tagged as a racist white supremacist hater -phobe -ist, then why on earth would you admit to any pollster your true intentions? I think it also indicates we should be sceptical about polls that are all "X is a sure result" for whatever side, because it does depend where you are polling, who you are polling, and how the questions are phrased.

Don't think it's shy-Tory. The No result was stronger than the polls in most states, but it's not stronger than the trendline of the polls (the polls showed Yes collapsing over time, so it's not surprising that Yes continued to collapse between the last polls and voting day). And the very last polls in Tas do show a sudden and massive shift to No, fairly consistent with the actual outcome. Maybe something happened in Tasmania that I don't know about.

Nah, more likely just small subgroup samples. Tasmania only has 500k people, it's normal for polling to be unreliable. You have to poll a lot of people to get enough Tasmanians to get a reliable subsample.

What is the pollster going to do to you?

How confident are you the pollster isn't compiling a list of political enemies? What do you gain by answering honestly? If the answer to the first question is "less than 100%" and the answer to the second is "Nothing," why would you ever answer honestly? It just seems like the obviously wrong decision (for non-Kantians, at least.)

I've never heard of someone in the US pretending to be a pollster to create a list of potential enemies, so I'd be basically 100% sure.

This same argument would cause you to expect a shy progressive effect that doesn't seem to exist.

Modern Western society does a lot more cancellation, hecklings and punishment of the insufficiently-left than the insufficiently-Right

As long as the chance is not zero, the argument says you must lie.

What's more important - that you answer a poll honestly or that someone likes you? In this world of anxiety and influencers it doesn't matter who the pollster is, only that they exist and might think less of you.

Is there less of a shy tory effect in online surveys where there isn't even anyone on the line who might judge you?

I dunno man,I have tended to give the answers the surveyors wanted to hear whenever I've been picked for one. Though these were over the phone, not online.

It's just a bit awkward and easier to tell them what (you think) they want

ABC (the Australian one) has a votemap by electorate. Unsurprisingly, electorates with the highest aboriginal population roughly correlate with an increased NO vote.

Heavy YES votes were concentrated in progressive areas, particularly those with low aboriginal populations (such as in inner Melbourne and Tasmania).

As discussed, there is muted sniping that this is somehow a racist result, rather than people voting against any group being given special privileges above other citizens, or against deliberately ill defined powers and the likelihood of additional spending being given to first nation people.

Aboriginals have been allocated additional resources and spending for multiple generations and still face huge disparities in quality of life and success (insert standard HBD argument here). Australia already has a federal ministerial portfolio to address their needs. Of course after all of this focus being met with little success, progressives wish to pour even more money into the pit by backdoor means such as through the voice to parliament. Thankfully it didn't pass the sniff test and Australians (for all of their cultural flaws) seem to still have working bullshit detectors. For now.

(insert standard HBD argument here)

While I don't believe it's the main reason, there is also the possibility that it's the help the aboriginals are getting that's causing the disparities in quality of life and success -- that is, "helping" is largely counterproductive.

(insert standard HBD argument here)

I think much of this doesn't even need the standard HBD argument of "evolution doesn't stop at the neck". Even if evolution does stop at the neck, Aboriginals had no cities and no domestic animals and thus were not selected for disease resistance to the extent Old Worlders were; same thing as why most Native Americans died in the Columbian Exchange. And they weren't selected for dealing with alcohol because TTBOMK they didn't have any. You don't even need to talk about the brain to get a biologicalist explanation of The Gap (whether or not that's the whole story, I'm not sure).

NB: I think there is cause to put at least some additional resources into figuring out ways around the effects I mention, even if I don't think a failure to get parity automatically equals being terrible. Having shitty immune systems isn't their fault.

I'm glad this lost despite the overwhelming support from most institutions but like all one-sided election results I get the impression (anecdotally) that people are reading too much into the result - on the left that Australians are all racist or heartless or at least misinformed, on the right that we've heroically stood up to say no to wokism or some such.

As much as I'd like to believe that Australians are categorically opposed to this kind of thing, the voice was polling 60-40 or better earlier in the year, so its failure probably comes down to swing voters being unhappy with the details - or lack thereof. I believe the median voter wants to help Aborigines - but they don't want to spend too much money on it or give a political blank check to the government.

on the right that we've heroically stood up to say no to wokism or some such

I think there's some degree of a respectability cascade going on, where SJ's hold over the populace through fear and guilt has been shaken and being conservative is starting to look more palatable and less like being a moral mutant. Note how terrified the Liberals were of actually taking the "no" side early on, but now Dutton's saying this is a victory over activists.

I don't think this is the entirety of the reason for the vote we got; there's causation both ways there, with the vote itself (and the polling) damaging the apparent SJ consensus - there's a reason I said it "seem[s] to have emboldened people" - and the proposal and Yes campaign sure did stuff up a lot. But it's got me hopeful. Still not really worth the price of having a giant CW fight, but silver linings.

Note how terrified the Liberals were of actually taking the "no" side early on, but now Dutton's saying this is a victory over activists.

That kind of opportunistic "run with the hare and hunt with the hounds" reaction (if the 'yes' side had won I'm sure he'd be claiming this was a victory for equality or the likes) reminds me of the pithy and tart bon mot by e.e. cummings:

a politician is an arse upon
which everyone has sat except a man

I know we aren't supposed to make low effort posts, but you make sense, and your analysis convinced me to change my mind on this issue.

If the referendum had been just to acknowledge indigenous people in the constitution, I feel it'd have gotten over the line. Tying it to adding another body for Indigenous advocacy to the untold score of them that already exist was the issue.

They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".

Yes: the BBC, having given both sides, puts the balance on the side of the "No" campaign being misleading:

Supporters said that entrenching the Indigenous peoples into the constitution would unite Australia and usher in a new era.

No leaders said that the idea was divisive, would create special "classes" of citizens where some were more equal than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

They were criticised over their appeal to undecided voters with a "Don't know? Vote no" message, and accused of running a campaign based on misinformation about the effects of the plan.

... Many of the nation's best constitutional minds have disputed those claims, arguing that the Voice would not have conferred special rights on anyone.

But the campaign's slogan "divisive Voice" which covered No banners and posters, ultimately resonated with voters.

Having earlier themselves described the Voice as:

a proposal to amend the constitution to recognise First Nations people and create a body for them to advise the government.

How can you have a special body to advise the government and not have special rights?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-67110193

As for misinformation, there were dirty tricks on both sides:

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/voice-to-parliament/yes23-campaign-deletes-tweet-suggesting-no-voters-could-put-a-cross-on-voice-to-parliament-ballot-after-aec-flagged-it-would-not-be-counted-as-a-formal-vote/news-story/fba4dbf82898246908f446f7232e4aaf

No leaders said that the idea was divisive, would create special "classes" of citizens where some were more equal than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

that sentence is kind of ambiguous. i guess the last 'and' makes the reading a bit more clear because you would expect that to be an 'or' if the 'No' at the start was not part of 'No leaders'.

Journalists' job is not to be good writers, so they often don't use punctuation like inverted commas in such cases, even though it would help for the reason you suggest.

...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".

Sorry to keep spamming replies, but I want to note directly that there at least some leaning on 'racist'.

For instance:

Meanwhile, the CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, Nerita Waight, said she was "horrified" by the result.

"In 2023, we had a chance to move forward rather than to stand still," she said.

"Australia voted today and now I clearly know what lies at this country's heart — racism.

"In my view, there is no way this doesn't impact detrimentally on the path to reconciliation and healing."

Or:

The big winners of this campaign are racism and misinformation. Before his term expired, the race commissioner Chin Tan called racism a “tentacled monster that feels impossible to slay, and its venomous nature seems to have only mutated in recent times”.

Tan said his greatest fears were realised and the debate was allowed to “degenerate into one about race”.

Or:

Many Indigenous people have maintained Australia is a racist country.

This is not to say every person who voted “no” on October 14 is a racist.

Motivations driving individual voting preferences are complicated, contested, perhaps even contradictory. We must be careful to not equate an individual “no” vote as a marker of individual racism. But ignoring patterns of racism and the relentless racist dialogue from some in the “no” campaign is to be wilfully, and knowingly, indifferent.

Racism is a drug, and Australia has an addiction.

Now to be fair, these are only a few voices, and the dominant line from the Yes campaign has been more muted. There are people who have taken other perspectives:

Yes campaigner Marcus Stewart, a Nira illim bulluk man of the Taungurung Nation and elected co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were hurting.

“It’s a tough result, it’s an emotional result,” he said. But he stressed that people who voted No were not racist.

“The Australian people have decided that the 92 words that were put to them wasn’t the best pathway that they saw for us to improve the lives of our people,” Stewart said.

“Australian people are not racist if they voted No. I want to be absolutely, categorically clear.”

Overall, I think now there is going to be a battle to interpret the result, and it no doubt will be ammunition for people who want to argue that Australia is systemically or structurally racist. But at least right now the claim that the defeat is because of racism appears to be more of a minority view.

Another supporting detail: the highest voted post on /r/australia right now is

The referendum campaign has cemented racism into the body politic, and the ‘baseless’ rejection of ‘Yes’ will create a bleak future for Australia and those who stood with First Nations people

although oddly it's the only post on the sub where people who voted No aren't being downvoted to oblivion. I can't understand the voting patterns on there.
What's the reputation of "The Saturday Paper?" Is it one of those online propaganda rags, or does it have an actual history? Their coverage page on this has been wild.

This might be surprising, but I actually hadn't heard of the Saturday Paper before this referendum. The impression I get is that they're pretty progressive - their original vision in 2014 reads as progressive to me.

This guide puts them as leaning left - about as much as the Conversation or Crikey, only slightly lower quality. Considering the quality of the Conversation or Crikey, I do not find being lower than them encouraging.That said, that chart also puts the ABC and SBS dead centre, which I doubt a neutral outside observer would, and putting The Age as dead centre also feels off, to me. The sense I always had in Melbourne was that The Age is the centre-left paper and the Herald Sun is the centre-right paper. It seems to me that the chart (which USC took from Reddit, of all places) is probably directionally correct, but what it labels 'center' is actually centre-left, and what it labels 'leans left' is actually solid left. This site also puts the Saturday Paper as on the left as well, which seems right.

You've already covered it, but like you as soon as I saw the left leaning ABC and SBS framed as centrist I knew the guide was biased in itself.

Reddit is dominated by the very young. This may give some insight into the future; unless the opinions of the younger generation change, we can anticipate that in twenty years, this No vote will be seen as racism, and they'll try again for a successful Yes.

But older voters aren't paying attention to this. They're dusting off their palms and throwing a shrimp on the barbie or whatever Aussies do.

  1. Reddit is dominated by a particular kind of young person. The question is how representative is the modal Reddit user compared to their cohort?

  2. As you allude to, will their politics age as they get older? Maybe a lot probably depends on whether you think their beliefs are deeply held or merely fashionable beliefs.

True. My sense is that woke attitudes correlate negatively with age, and from what I read, attitudes formed in young adulthood stick around. See for example https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/adolescence-lasts-forever

From that, I presume that Yes is going to gain some ground over the next few decades as No dies off. To me a bigger question is what the even younger generation will end up wanting or believing once Reddit goes the way of the Tasmanian Tiger.

we can anticipate that in twenty years, this No vote will be seen as racism, and they'll try again for a successful Yes.

And then another generation or so after that, the old "conservatives" will be valiantly-but-futilely trying to conserve the outcomes of that successful Yes against the next big move leftward. Cthulhu may swim slowly…

Well, I think a lot of what people refer to as leftward drift is, or is really, drift toward the kinds of attitudes that go along with wealth, security, and technological advancement. Even though the social foundation has been worsening for some time, technology continues to improve, creating a curious anxiety and helplessness in modern individuals.

But my guess is that the economy will soon drift downwards as well, spurring a rejection of hollow technological distractions, and giving rise to something that might look like conservatism, but isn't exactly - I don't foresee a return to religion, for instance.

It's a left-wing/socialist paper I think.

I mean, Reddit major sub.

Kinda surprised to see that from Marcus Stewart. He's someone I usually expect to be pretty loose with accusations of racism (e.g. he accused the much-more-visibly-Aboriginal Jacinta Price of racism during the campaign).

I think there's going to end up being a split between the Labor types who recognise the need to win swing voters to get anything done and see how counterproductive the "everyone else is racist" argument is, and the Greens types who are more interested in being angry than getting wins.

Yeah, there was one on the ABC too. But the panellists pushed back really hard. I said "at-least-partial" intending to imply that full credit is arguable.

Honestly something that amused/amazed me on the life outcome gap between Indigenous & Median Australians is that it's about the same size as other countries with their Indigenous populations, regardless of treaty, reconciliation, privileges etc.

Maoris have about the same gap

One suggestion that occurs me, particularly as regards strategy, is this note:

This is key to understanding the Yes side. No decisions were taken without the authority of the key Indigenous leadership, including Pearson, Langton, Davis and Dean Parkin, who often made collective decisions in phone hook-ups and meetings separate from non-Indigenous members of the campaign.

These leaders formed the ballast of the government’s 21-member referendum advisory group charged with finalising the amendment and advising the cabinet on referendum strategy.

“Megan almost had veto power on some issues,” says one source unwilling to go on the record due to the current sensitivities.

I'm sure we've had discussion before of how excessive deference to identitarian concerns comes at the expense of competence of merit - this might be a good example of that.

But it's also potentially a good example of how celebrity or ego-driven campaigns can fail. Foreigners might not recognise them, but Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, and Megan Davis are very prominent names that any Australian who's been paying a moderate amount of attention to indigenous issues would recognise. All three of them have been active in the field for decades.

However, the way the world looks from the relatively small world of professional Aboriginal activism - Pearson and Davis are lawyers specialising in indigenous issues, and Langton is a full-time activist - can be distorting, or might have contributed to poor judgement of the state of the Australian people. It might have been better for the Yes campaign if politicians or non-indigeneous campaign managers had been able to push back or develop other strategies. But a politics of deference, whether that's deference to Aboriginal people or deference to supposed subject-matter experts, cannot allow that.

This is veering pretty close to waging culture war and, while not building consensus, assuming consensus.

My understanding of the spirit of the Motte is that when you write on the Motte, you should not assume a background of people who share your political views.

That is, my understanding is that this is not supposed to be a place where you share excited "inside opinions" about how your preferred politics are going.

I say this not as someone who is for the "Yes", but just as someone who does not want more culture war waging here.

That is, my understanding is that this is not supposed to be a place where you share excited "inside opinions" about how your preferred politics are going.

This seems to be basically a complaint that someone is expressing their political views which you don't necessarily agree with.

I don't see anything in the OP that would constitute "culture warring." We talk about culture war here, and that usually means including one's own takes on it.

Yes, I over-reacted. See my follow-up answer to magic9mushroom.

Is there something I assumed that you'd like explained in more detail?

Might as well be proactive regarding the "misinformation" issue. Using the top result on Google (the people on the news tonight IIRC didn't specify what they objected to, with one exception that I'll come back to) and the official No case mailed to every Australian at government expense (along with a Yes case of equal length).

1 - "Australians will lose ownership of homes Variations of this claim include: Australians will be forced to pay reparations or the voice will increase taxes (ie, the voice will cost you money)"

Certainly, the idea that the referendum would directly imply reparations, that's false. The more measured case (and this one definitely is in the official No campaign) is that a Yes result would have a) built a Pro-Aboriginal consensus, which might make people more friendly to reparations, b) directly provided some level of soft influence to Aboriginals - that's the whole point, giving them an advisory body - which they might then use to advocate for reparations. I shy away from using this as motive to vote - feels a bit Machiavellian - but it seems plausible enough to me in terms of the facts (on both counts) and the Uluru Statement which inspired the voice does call for a "treaty" of some sort.

As for the latter part, certainly "voting for the Voice will directly raise taxes" is clear misinformation. The official No case merely said the Voice "will be costly" and said we don't know how much funding would be allocated to the Voice. It's not misinformation to say that government bodies cost money - that's extremely, obviously true - and "we don't know how much funding would be allocated" is also true.

2 - "The voice is legally risky Variations of this include claims that the voice is a third chamber of parliament, will dictate laws to the government, or will destabilise democracy"

Basically, the question here is "would the Voice have the power to block legislation". The No claim is that because the proposed change to the Constitution gives the Parliament the power to decide what powers the Voice has, Parliament might give the Voice the power to block Aboriginal-related legislation. The claim of misinformation is that this wouldn't or couldn't happen. To refute that claim, I cite the very article claiming it's misinformation:

Constitutional law experts are largely in agreement that there is nothing in the voice’s addition to the constitution which would lead to legal risk.

"Largely". That is, there are some that disagree (and indeed the official No case quotes a former High Court judge). So on the "could" question, there is some chance that trying it might work.

I ran the numbers, and was quite confident that the Parliament would not in fact do this; even if they tried, it would almost certainly fail to pass the Senate. But "the chance of X is very low" doesn't make "X could happen" misinformation; small probabilities of harm can be relevant to a vote if the harm is large enough. So on this one, I'll go to the wall on "plausible if unlikely; not misinformation".

3 - "The voice will divide the nation"

This is the one which was explicitly mentioned on the ABC coverage I saw. Not by an interviewee - one of the ABC journalists was interviewing the head of the No campaign, said this "wasn't factual" and asked him whether he regretted lying.

I don't understand the claims that this is misinformation. The claims that it's false (including the journalist, although not the article I'm beating up on) mostly just say "the Australian Constitution already gives the power to make laws for a specific race". The Constitution definitely does do that (it's extremely rarely used), but I'm not seeing why that makes "a specific body created to advocate for one racial grouping is dividing people into buckets by race" false.

The article I'm beating up on said that there are lobby groups already. Yes, there are, but not Constitutionally-recognised ones representing specific races. Again, not seeing the relevance.

My verdict: this is entirely true, the claims of misinformation border on misinformation themselves, I'll go to the wall on that.

4 - "The voice will force treaties"

See above under #1. The official No case said that this might lead to "Treaty" via people listening to the Voice and/or activists being emboldened, not that the Voice would directly force it. So the strawman/weak-man they're attacking would be misinformation, but the official case's point on this is quite plausible.

The article gets classy and says "There is no evidence for either, as the federal government has not indicated it will be engaging in those processes no matter what the outcome of the vote is." - do I really need to lay into this?

5 - "There are no details Variations of this claim include: you don’t know what you’re voting for and the voice is a Trojan horse for ‘secret agendas’"

I'm just going to quote the words in the article immediately following this:

There is plenty of detail. None of it is set in stone, because that is the parliament’s job, but we have an in-principle guide of what the voice under this government (because legislation can always be changed) would look like.

Exactly. We didn't know what we were voting for, because they had the legal option to change their minds afterward. Unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible.

Verdict: Largely accurate, not misinformation, I'll go to the wall on that.

6 - "The voice will allow the UN to take over Australia"

This is complete misinformation, no objections. (As you might expect, this one did not appear in any form in the official "no" case; this is just crazies.)

7 - "The Australian Electoral Commission will tamper with your votes"

Misinformation in the most blatant form that they're quoting, no objections. The AEC is highly trustworthy.

However, attention was drawn to the fact that ticks are counted as Yes and crosses are counted as invalid (not No). This is a known fact, the AEC went to court defending it against the alt-right UAP and won. This isn't tampering per se, the AEC told people to write Yes or No rather than to use a tick or cross, and it's not new for this referendum, but objecting to this policy isn't "false", it's an Ought statement saying that the speaker would prefer a different policy. On that one I'd say "not misinformation"; no Ought statement can be misinformation and the AEC 100% did the thing being objected to.

Note also on this one that the Yes campaign chose a colour representing itself that is identical to the AEC's official colour. They got in a little bit of trouble over this, although not a lot. So there were some things in AEC purple that were not impartial - they were Yes campaign material - although that's the Yes campaign being scummy and not the AEC.

Overall, I think it's fair to say that the No campaign's "misinformation" largely wasn't any such thing*, although as I noted there were crazies who said false things.

*There's one thing in the official No case that I think borders on misinformation. That's when they said "there is no comparable constitutional body like this anywhere in the world". Out of context I think that's false, although it's in the middle of an argument that there would be legal questions raised and in that sense it's justifiable because while similar bodies exist, it's not a 1:1 clone of them. Definite side-eye on that one, even if it makes a bit more sense in context.

The more measured case (and this one definitely is in the official No campaign) is that a Yes result would have a) built a Pro-Aboriginal consensus, which might make people more friendly to reparations, b) directly provided some level of soft influence to Aboriginals - that's the whole point, giving them an advisory body - which they might then use to advocate for reparations. I shy away from using this as motive to vote - feels a bit Machiavellian

Only if you think reparations are just and good but you just personally don't want to pay for them. If you are against reparations for fundamental or even pragmatic reasons, then "vote against a proposal that will have bad consequences further down the line" is perfectly reasonable.

Note that "it will cost money without achieving anything useful" is also a valid reason to be against something, even if it doesn't come out of your pocket.

Here we're not talking about "if I vote for the Voice the Voice will be able to extract reparations, which is bad", we're talking about "if I vote for the Voice it will shape the national conversation in a way which might lead to people voting for reparations, which is bad". The latter, unlike the former, is going into the Dark Arts realm of treating people as manipulable and prioritising optics over ground truth, hence my term Machiavellian.

It's not a matter of me thinking reparations are good, it's a matter of me saying "these corrupt means are not justified by this good end".

Now, I happen to have plenty of non-Dark-Arts justifications for voting No - "Aboriginals are already overrepresented in Parliament", "special racial privileges are bad", and "vague language that could be twisted into veto" are the ones I can think of offhand - so I did indeed vote No with a clear conscience. But I frown on this one particular motivation; we're Rats and we're supposed to be better than that.

I don’t really get your point. Let’s say you think the voice is a mild good thing, but are 100% opposed to reparations. Clearly your Yes vote helps reparations, invites reparations, legitimates reparations to a degree. Imo it’s perfectly acceptable to vote No as a signal, and action, indirectly targeted against the outcome you really care about, reparations.

Often governments will use referenda as a show of support. Is it machiavellian to vote according to your support for the government instead of the relatively unimportant question being asked?

Yes.

"100% opposed" is not entirely clear; I'd describe myself as 100% opposed to reparations IRL but I still don't think they're, like, Holocaust-level bad. If I did think they were Holocaust-level bad and I also thought the Voice was a mild good thing, I'd probably vote No and feel bad about it. Dark Arts can be the lesser evil, and even I do use them on occasion, but they're still Dark Arts and becoming inured to their use is a bad idea.

What is your objection? That it’s a sort of lie, because you vote no when you really believe yes?

For me, every referendum has implicit questions baked in, such as ‘do you support the current government’, or here ‘do you support reparations, the woke stuff, the ‘yes’ side generally, etc’, and although it is not official, it is legitimate to vote on those.

My theory is that a lie is only a lie if the counterpart expects the truth, and the more he expects it, the more it is a lie. But in this case, other voters, and the government, expect you to answer based on those other questions too, so it’s not a lie (or rather, any answer would be a lie in some way, so any answer is morally fine).

More comments

The latter, unlike the former, is going into the Dark Arts realm of treating people as manipulable

But people are manipulable, and pretending otherwise is not going to help you navigate politics. If you're worried about the signal of your vote being misunderstood by other people to bad effect, it's perfectly valid to account for that.

I also think the worry is less that a yes vote would by itself naturally lead to support for reparations, but rather that it would be used by proponents as an argument to make it seems to have more support that it actually does. In which case the proponents are the ones employing Dark Arts, and you're merely depriving them of their tools. That would just be recognizing Dark Arts and taking countermeasures, i.e. Defense against the Dark Arts.

prioritising optics over ground truth

The point of voting is to signal the will of the voters, not to figure out some sort of "ground truth". A vote is always a public signal, and it's entirely fair to think about what exactly you're signalling compared to what you want to signal.

The latter, unlike the former, is going into the Dark Arts realm of treating people as manipulable and prioritising optics over ground truth, hence my term Machiavellian.

That's politics. If you're not willing to think that way, you'll get steamrollered by people who do.

>Is there something I assumed that you'd like explained in more detail?

>>Might as well be proactive regarding the "misinformation" issue

Huh? What was the assumption you felt went against the rules? What is and isn't misinformation is a different argument. You wrote a lot here without address your initial objection.

Edit, I'm an r-slur.

The posts you quote are both mine; I replied to myself. I made the first post you quote, and then later (later enough that editing felt like people might miss it) decided to not wait for a reply and proactively explain the one controversial claim I made in the OP (that the claims of misinformation were mostly wrong).

Sorry for the confusion, although they both do say "magic9mushroom" at the top.

D'oh! I need to start looking at user names.

It makes sense, I should probably drink a little less on the weekends

Sorry, I was drunk-posting when I read the above and I think I read something into it that was not there.

On re-reading it, I realized that even if there is some little bit of culture war waging in it, which I'm not sure, it's very minor by Motte standards, to the point that it would probably be hard to write anything about politics without having a similar degree of slant.

My apologies!

I mean, I did neglect to explain what I meant when I challenged the "misinformation" claim, and you prompted me to remedy that. But yes, apology accepted.


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