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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27727 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Following on from the defeat of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum (seriously can we just include Torres Strait Islanders in the definition of "Aboriginal"? The whole phrase is too many words) Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the silence is now over. The leaders of the Yes campaign have published an open letter to the Parliament, and it is salty. So salty that reportedly some people refused to sign on to it - and perhaps that is why it appears without any names attached.

It opens by describing Australia's decision to vote no as "appalling and mean-spirited". It asserts that "It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around." It says that "the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act". So on and so forth.

In short, it is very much filled with the sort of resentment and hostility that turns people off, hard. Even on the normally far left /r/australia subreddit, posters are tearing strips off it.

This is of course a terrible time for the Yes campaigners to be acting in this way. With the failure of the Voice, indigenous policy is in a state of flux. The government is licking its wounds and weighing how to respond. These activists could not have made a better argument for why they should be sidelined in those deliberations.

Collective decision making isn't best even in nominally very smart populations.

E.g. as someone on twitter observed, Israeli PR would have been far better had they started bombing after spending a week showing decapitated babies and bloody child rooms to the world.

A cold blooded autocrat in charge of Israel could have managed that..

A cold blooded autocrat in charge of Israel could have managed that..

could have managed that. The median cold blooded autocrat would have carpetbombed the place and be gassing the rubble as we speak.

Given how much damage the success of the initial Hamas raid did to Netanyahu's authority, an effective cold-blooded autocrat would surely be focusing on identifying the wreckers and saboteurs who could be blamed, which is far more important to their long-term survival than the details of the inevitably successful punitive expedition in response.

Isn't that the most salient critique against someone like Bibi? Putting short term political goals and victories over the long term goals for Israel?

Maybe try find a more opportune time to kill your enemy than when the entire world is feeling sorry for them. Reflexively raising your hand in anger is a poor look. Especially when it ends up impotently flailing around killing civilians. Hard to call that a success.

Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.

Were these actual aboriginal leaders, or were these white activists with a great-great grandmother who may or may not have been 1/16 aboriginal, no one can tell for certain?

The latter, obviously. Last time I was in Australia the attitude I was picking up from young educated Australians was "This is obviously a racket, and someone who isn't Pauline Hanson needs to sort it out before she gets a chance to." The cultural display put on for us included a bunch of whitefellas (presumably with the requisite blood quantum - I didn't check) performing traditional Aboriginal dance in a way which was cringe for everyone involved, although I assume the fake abos were getting paid.

There’s a minimum blood quantum to be aboriginal in Australia?

There isn't really. Which is how you end up with white neurologists identifying as aboriginal with only a great grandfather who was indigenous.

There's no formal requirement - this was one issue with the Voice. In theory there's the three-part test (have Aboriginal ancestors, identify as Aboriginal, be accepted as Aboriginal by the community in which you live), but what it mostly boils down to in practice is self-identification.

You'd think being a very immigration friendly nation would prevent blood and soil rhetoric like:

"It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around."

But apparently not for all groups. I guess the brown "occupiers" just stay out of this stuff?

I don’t think Australia is best described as “very immigration friendly.”

Australia is the only country in the world with a policy of mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum seekers who arrive without a valid visa.

Whether or not that makes sense, it’s been a point of contention.

... yeah, a lot of what people think of as immigration-friendly is mostly the backpacker's / working holiday visa, and that's really a short-term labor thing that's near-impossible to turn into long-term residence.

Yep, Australia actually has a pretty restricitve immigration policy where if any single one of your family members has a medical condition the Australian government deems too expensive to treat, every single one of you can get your visa refused.

What about economic migrants though? I think asylum seekers are their own kettle of fish.

(Canada, for example, has a lot of both forms of migration but would still be incredibly immigration friendly by most standards if they just stuck to economic migrants and foreign students).

More than a quarter of the population are first generation immigrants. Expand that to second generation and it's almost half of us.

We are extremely immigration friendly. Including for refugees. We just insist on people following the rules.

Australia is around 30% immigrants. They are excessively immigrant friendly.

Asylum seekers are a small and special subset of would be immigrants. Making them stay on Asylum Seeker Prison Island is a good choice.

One of the reasons we are very immigrant friendly is that we are actually serious about, and effective at, keeping illegal immigrants out. Don't conflate immigration with not enforcing the border.

You know, I find the implication that there's something wrong with "blood and soil" a bit odd. Citizenship is always jus soli or jus sanguinis.

It's not about whether it's wrong to me. As a migrant it's not in my interests but I don't really see it as inherently wrong.

The point is that many pro-immigrant regimes and the most cosmopolitan amongst their number tend to, for obvious reasons. Except when they apparently don't.

It's always been ethnonationalism for me but not for thee with these types.

It has been very striking as well, at least to me, the way that rhetoric has blamed the result specifically on white Australia, and not on multicultural Australia.

There are significantly more Chinese-Australians than there are Aboriginal Australians. There are more Indian-Australians than there are Aboriginal Australians. But they apparently don't merit a mention?

This shows the disconnect between leftists and Aboriginal leaders and what the actual goal was. Now the mask is off and the leftists see what they really believe.

Australia is our country. We accept that the majority of non-Indigenous voting Australians have rejected recognition in the Australian Constitution. We do not for one moment accept that this country is not ours. Always was. Always will be. It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around. Our sovereignty has never been ceded.

It's really that simple.

Wow, that's a remarkable quote. It's incredible that they can openly state they want nothing less than ethno-supremacy while mainstream media sources are calling so many people racist for not being one-sided enough in their favor. A banal and obvious observation I know, but you usually don't hear admission of it that plainly, and that puts into perspective how incredible it is that such a narrative is safely forwarded by people who are treated like they have a monopoly on the concept of racial justice in the mainstream discourse.

I think it goes to show how little the regime takes these kinds of people as threats. They can say this because they pose no threat and are often useful to the people running these countries. Meanwhile, the far right groups in the West get treated like a threat because they actually are. Say what you want about the trucker protest or Jan 6, but they actually threatened the regime and elites so they were dealt with harshly. There's a buffer zone on the left where they can be radicals and not really cause any issues or threaten anything. They are running up against it now with Palestine and Israel and finally getting serious push back so you can tell that is one stance that actually threatens the regime and the elites.

It really is incredible that this is has widespread buy-in among serious people living in the west. Apparently an explicit ethnostate is something we should be aiming for and defending. Their ultimate aim is to establish explicit rules around this:

  • Establish "the right to exercise national self-determination" in Australia is "unique to the Aboriginal people."
  • Establish Aboriginal languages as Australia's official languages and downgrade English to a "special status."
  • Establish "Aboriginal settlement as a national value" and mandate that the Australian state "will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development."

You can read more here. Imagine if something like this actually became law in a nation purporting to be a liberal democracy.

It's especially insane to me in that, if one were going to be racist against any group, Aboriginal Australians have the weakest arguments to make of maybe any ethnic group in the world. They have made virtually zero scientific, economic, cultural, sporting, artistic, political, military, domestic contributions to global culture.

I literally can't think of any other ethnicity, outside of super specific small groups, that I can't make a better argument for. Gypsy culture might be made up of criminals, but Django Reinhardt. We've seen the arguments against Jews and American Blacks rehashed a million times, but vast swathes of modern physics and literature and music and sport argues in their favor. Serbians can't have an independent country for thirty years without starting a war, but there's plenty of great Serbians. Even little Arab Palestine has given us the odd poet, or emigrant businessman or model.

What have Aboriginal Australians ever contributed? The digiridoo?

I typed out and then deleted a longer comment - something which I’ve done several times before whenever the subject of Australian Aborigines comes up. There’s nothing I can say that won’t be perceived (correctly) as cruel and dehumanizing. As far as I’m concerned, they are an actual honest-to-god Stone Age relict population. Not the blue-eyed fake Aborigines who’d be empowered by this farcical “Voice” venture, but the real ones out there in the Outback sniffing gasoline. They appear to have somehow avoided most of the evolutionary pressures which have caused nearly every other human population to develop modern human physiognomy and cognitive aptitude. I get genuinely distressed when I look at them or when I think about what Australia could possibly do about this population, and it would be beyond the bounds of tolerable behavior in this community for me to comment in any detail about what I foresee for them moving forward.

Even if you take out HBD, they live in the middle of nowhere. How can they possibly generate wealth out there? I was just in the Midwest and the rural downs out there are straight up just dead and full of zombie opiate addicts wandering downtown. I was just in Peoria, IL and I have never seen such a dead rust belt city before. And this is with white people in the US. There is no opportunity for them where they live.

People move for economic opportunities all the time. The catch, of course, is that they have to be economically useful.

Each year millions of people willingly uproot themselves to go to a different country in search of better economic wealth etc, and those who have potential manage to achieve it to varying degrees. India is extremely poor, Indian Americans are very rich, high human capital Indians when placed in an environment conducive to generating wealth do extremely well. Australian aboriginals don't, e.g. Australian aboriginals in large cities don't do paticularly well compared to the median inhabitants of those cities.

Consider the Dingo which may be a feral descendant of previously domesticated canines brought to Australia but for some reason were neither managed nor bred for thousands of years. The implications make it a bit of a controversial explanation.

I get genuinely distressed when I look at them or when I think about what Australia could possibly do about this population, and it would be beyond the bounds of tolerable behavior in this community for me to comment in any detail about what I foresee for them moving forward.

Gene therapy. If there's a good reason we're not going full steam ahead on it, it's yet to find my ears (GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good).

Oh wait, the sterling and terminally resistant to reality claim that all human populations are equal, especially cognitively so, acts as a barrier to even recognizing there is a problem, or at least it's not the kind of problem you solve by giving them handouts or schools.

I'd argue that the prior British policy of encouraging interbreeding was a step in the right direction, even if I suspect that diminished the capabilities of inter-racial children. It would all have been worth it, if it eliminated a disgruntled population of millions that modern Wokists can point to and yell "systemic racism" without much in the way of pushback since HBD left the Overton Window.

GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good

But Gore Vidal is in that movie!

It would all have been worth it, if it eliminated a disgruntled population of millions that modern Wokists can point to and yell "systemic racism" without much in the way of pushback since HBD left the Overton Window.

Interbreeding was a good idea, and European genes seem to be dominant over aboriginal ones in basically every instance, but it’s important to note that the remaining pure-blooded aborigines aren’t the ones that are crying racism, it’s the mixed race descendants who everyone thinks of as just white.

I'm aware of that, but I think they'd have a much harder time getting sympathy if they didn't have their pure-bred cousins to point at, implicitly conflating the problems they face.

It's not like you can tell most of them apart from "pure" whites, which makes keeping identity cards straight when you're a card-carrying activist difficult.

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Aren't there already gene therapies being developed? Isn't it instead that testing on human subjects is subject to agreed upon international standards? I think you can do this research but you are subject to Institutional Review Boards or your country equivalent. I don't see any involvement of neo-luddites in preventing this research, unless you consider human rights to be a stumbling block.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki

With how much panic and FUD there is over simply eating GMOs versus becoming them?

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2020.0082

A large majority of countries (96 out of 106) surveyed have policy documents—legislation, regulations, guidelines, codes, and international treaties—relevant to the use of genome editing to modify early-stage human embryos, gametes, or their precursor cells. Most of these 96 countries do not have policies that specifically address the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos in laboratory research (germline genome editing); of those that do, 23 prohibit this research and 11 explicitly permit it. Seventy-five of the 96 countries prohibit the use of genetically modified in vitro embryos to initiate a pregnancy (heritable genome editing). Five of these 75 countries provide exceptions to their prohibitions. No country explicitly permits heritable human genome editing. These data contrast markedly with previously reported findings.

That seems like regulatory hell if I've ever seen one.

I think you can do this research but you are subject to Institutional Review Boards or your country equivalent

Ah, IRBs, a pox on human progress, without even smallpox around to contest for the greater evil.

unless you consider human rights to be a stumbling block

Why, I do, so good guess even if purely by accident.

The AMA condemns it, for example:

The American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs stated that "genetic interventions to enhance traits should be considered permissible only in severely restricted situations: (1) clear and meaningful benefits to the fetus or child; (2) no trade-off with other characteristics or traits; and (3) equal access to the genetic technology, irrespective of income or other socioeconomic characteristics.

Imagine if they banned elective surgeries or something like braces because, gasp, it costs money, and the rich can better take advantage of it than the poor.

Make no mistake, the whole field has been pushed back decades by intentional lobbying from bioethicists and the usual useful idiots on the environmentalist side.

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Oh wait, the sterling and terminally resistant to reality claim that all human populations are equal, especially cognitively so, acts as a barrier to even recognizing there is a problem, or at least it's not the kind of problem you solve by giving them handouts or schools.

I predict that progressives will turn on a dime on the idea of HBD as soon as gene therapy becomes a viable way to bring all groups into IQ parity. They might not acknowledge the change publicly, but there will be zero barriers to implementation.

I'm going to take the opposite side here, progressives tend to go by moral purity over factual accuracy, the denial of HBD will continue far longer than we have robust methods for intelligence augmentation. Right now, the best bet is embryo selection, which may be good for 2-8 IQ points unless you go for more intense selection, at which point you can really push the envelope.

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Just as environmentalists dismiss geoengineering out of hand, modern progressives will never accept eugenics.

If there's a good reason we're not going full steam ahead on it, it's yet to find my ears (GATTACA and associated neo-ludditism is excluded from good).

Can I interest you in Brave New World, or the more recent and pop-sci-fi Red Rising? This is the first step towards genetically predetermined caste systems, for further hominid speciation. You don't get Gammas or Reds without people like you arguing for Alphas and Golds.

While mildly entertaining works of fiction, they're about as accurate a representation of the future.

Without something going seriously awry, there's no chance that humanity ends up in a caste system of that nature, since-

  1. We have robotic automation, which is more efficient and less ethically dubious than breeding a slave caste.

  2. Genetic augmentation is unlikely to be expensive after economies of scale develop, and there is no plausible path to having such a wide gulf between the haves and have nots.

  3. HBD suggests we already have stark differentials between different populations, so it's a moot point. How many aboriginal Australian Nobel Prize winners are there again? And how many Jewish ones? Your brand of ludditism makes a terrible tradeoff of denying the uplift of one end of the spectrum while claiming to prevent what already exists.

the real ones out there in the Outback sniffing gasoline.

You're a little out of date on this - we successfully reduced petrol sniffing in Aboriginal communities by 95%

All we had to do was develop special petrol that doesn't get you high when you sniff it and ban normal petrol in Aboriginal communities.

“In 2006 when low aromatic fuel was first rolled out in Central Australia, there were around 500 people sniffing in our region with an average of seven deaths per year; it was an epidemic,” Mr Ray said.

This is some black-comedy satire article leaking into real life. I thought I was jaded, but this is horrific.

Oh trust me, it gets way more horrifying than that.

For example, approximately a quarter of Aboriginal girls in remote communities are victims of child sex abuse.

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What's the denominator for those numbers? I'm reading that Central Australia has only about 40K people, 43% Aboriginal + Torres Strait, so call that 17K, so 7/17K gives a drug-overdose-per-100K rate of 41 ... which is higher than the USA (32/100K in 2022) but not by nearly as much as you'd hope. The US already has demographics with worse rates (and I'm talking "males", not anything with p-hacked granularity), and our rates are still increasing, not dropping by 95%. A lot of the increase is fentanyl, but cocaine and meth are going way up too.

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LMAO WHAT, I thought Rama Rama was just a meme.

I've honestly always wanted to see a proper, unbiased longitudinal study of the Stolen Generation to establish what the life outcomes of the 'stolen' were versus those who remained remote. I suspect the results would shock the common narrative.

That’s the point though. You’ll notice most of what the ultra woke point to as ‘whiteness’ is the very things that make or made whites so successful. I’m trying hard not to straw man but it really does seem like a bunch of this crap is just cover for worshipping lack of success through bad behavior, stupidity, and dysfunction, and stigmatizing productivity and contribution. I couldn’t tell you why that worldview exists; I think it’s a side effect of turning African American cultural complaints into mental masturbation, but it really is what it looks like.

I couldn’t tell you why that worldview exists; I think it’s a side effect of turning African American cultural complaints into mental masturbation, but it really is what it looks like.

Ultimately you can see it as a rejection of the idea of competence and hierarchy. All hierarchies and power differentials are inherently unjust according to a far left view, because they involve one being dominating another. Competence is simply a way to justify the hierarchical subjugation.

A post modern belief system that had a lot of influence on the Cthulhu mythos?

As a random aside, there was a great supplement to the Cthulu RPG based around the Mythos in Australia. Bunyips vs Elder Things etc. It was even added to the National Library.

That's awesome, I am going to have to track down a copy! Are you very familiar with it? I see I can buy the pdf from chaosium, but I'm not buying a second edition from 2019 sight unseen, not for more than $10.

I've browsed it, but sadly don't have a copy myself and can't help tracking it down.

It also inspired a board game, which is pretty good if you like the idea of chasing down Bunyips with an armoured train.

Link doesn't work, but that sounds like fun.

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With such a damning comment, do you know any Aboriginal Australians?

There are some excellent Aboriginal athletes. But yeah, not a ton of scientists or businesspeople.

I'm not a big HBD guy - not because I think all people are exactly the same, but because I think cultural and governance issues are usually much more important - the two Koreas being a prime example. But if I were the kind of guy who wanted to go around making HBD arguments... the ethnic group with an average IQ of 62 that continues to have catastrophic outcomes on every socioeconomic measure no matter how much money and effort is spent to try and help them would be one of the first examples I'd reach for.

Richard Hanania has argued that the example of North Korea supports rather than contradicts the argument: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-east-asian-package

Hanania is an idiot though. North Korea's outcomes are objectively terrible. I don't doubt their people are every bit as intelligent as South Koreans, but that just goes to show the limits of what intelligence can give you.

There is something of a cottage industry here of people arguing about the overlooked complexity of Aboriginal civilisation. Often it's very vague and unquantifiable stuff about having tended the land for millennia. Sometimes it's just noble savage nonsense, like the claim that at least they didn't war with each other (they did) and all respected each other (they didn't) and had gender equality (take a guess).

Sometimes it's a bit more complex. Dark Emu is the most famous text to spring to mind - a fellow argued that Aboriginals had a settled, agricultural civilisation.

As far as I can tell Dark Emu is a simple motte-and-bailey. The easily-defended motte is that Aboriginal people, like pretty much all nomadic hunter-gatherers, recognised good spots, would leave seeds behind them for their return migration, and could make basic fish traps and the like. The implausible bailey is that this constitutes agriculture and the Aboriginals were "ahead of many other parts of the world".

Having read Dark Emu I found it kind of incoherent where a lot of the case for Aboriginal statehood is essentially 'they were unsophisticated to the point that there was not a conventional state to be made war on and/or a concept of territory, therefore the conquest is illegitimate as they never surrendered' then Dark Emu tries to argue that they were notably more sophisticated than the basic understanding which... legitimizes European conquest?

Funny, but I think you'll find Israel to have no shortage of mainstream criticism on the basis of its status as an apartheid settler-colonialist etc state. I do not think it is as easy to find such things critical of efforts to constitutionally enshrine the veneration of "designated oppressed minority groups" like the aboriginals.

Even the anti-voice arguments did not speak in anywhere near the harshness that Israel is often regarded with. Instead, they focused on how "This won't even help the aboriginals!" instead of it being a concerted effort to officially develop a new ethnostate policy.

...erm, aren't we talking about Aboriginal people?

Israel does get plenty of criticism for its approach here, obviously, and it doesn't seem relevant to Australia. I think the better comparison would be to other self-described indigenous peoples. Certainly during the Voice campaign we heard a lot of people talking about Maoris and Native Americans and Canadian First Nations.

Honestly something that struck me on doing very basic research into other countries' Indigeous persons was that the Australian Aboriginal's life expectancy gap with the median was about the same size as it is for the Maoris and First Nations people. Despite the latter two having the 'benefits' of deeper recognition in their countries.

Really? Amerinds seem a lot better off than I’d expect aborigines to be, based on how I’ve heard them described.

Well, let's take some specific metrics. Let's compare Australian Aboriginals, Maoris, American Indians, and Canadian First Nations relative to the surrounding culture, on a few different metrics.

Hypothesis: if the claim that the Voice and recognition would help to close the gap is true, the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people should be significantly worse in Australia than in the other three nations.

Life expectancy:

(sticking with pre-covid figures if possible)

Aboriginals: 71.6 years male, 75.6 years female. Compare to 81.3 years male and 85.4 years female for non-indigenous, for an average gap of around 10 years.

Maoris: 73.0 years male, 77.1 years female. Compare to 80.3 years male and 83.9 years female for non-Maori (same link), for an average gap of around 6-7 years.

American Indians: I'm having a harder time finding a clear result here. This page gives 73.1 years for Indians, versus 79.1 years overall average, though it's not by gender. However, it could be more complicated, and America is the largest and most diverse nation, so I'm more cautious here. Pages like this suggest it might be more complicated. Still, let's ballpark it around 6 years.

Canadian First Nations: 72.5 years male, 77.7 years female. Compare to 81 years male, 85 years female for non-indigenous, for an everage gap of around 8-9 years.

Conclusion: Aboriginals do have the worst figures here, so count that as circumstantial evidence in favour of treaties and recognition. That said I would like to see a lot more evidence around causation.

Income:

(I'm not going to stress about currency conversions here, or weekly versus yearly income, because what matters for us here is the indigenous:non-indigenous ratio)

Aboriginals: Average weekly household income is $1507 AUD according to the ABS (compared to anything from 1358 through 2061 in general)), but equivalised, AIHW says $830 AUD, compared to $1080 for non-indigenous. I'm just going to estimate that Aboriginals are making approximately 77% what non-Aboriginals make.

Maoris: This site tells us that in 2013 the median income for Maoris was 78.9% of the national median, which I'm happy to just accept.

American Indians: Wiki has us covered here: $56,990 USD yearly median household income for Indians in 2021, versus 76,330 for the whole population. This translates to Amerian Indians making about 75% as much as non-Indians.

Canadian First Nations: Per page 32 here, average indigenous income in Canada is around 66% that of non-indigenous people.

Conclusion: I don't see any correlation here. Aboriginals are the 2nd-best-off of these groups, and the gap between Aboriginals, Maoris, and American Indians seems well within margin of error to me. The real surprise for me here is Canada, which I didn't think was that much worse.

I was going to make a pass on education as well, but that's proving harder to find figures for.

The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?

I mean I have no doubt that there's probably a lot of partisan media but I'm wondering how true this is because my exposure has usually left me thinking that media there is about as left-leaning as America's.

Anyway, it's probably a good thing they went for that invective though if you don't want the pending disinformation bill to pass. I'd bet if that letter was a lot softer they could convince a lot more people that "a 'false sense of balance' over facts." needs some agency to force the media to make rules to be policed.

The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?

No, I'm pretty sure this is just standard progressive whining that their enemies were allowed to speak at all, and defining anything that does not agree with them as misinformation. A la Brexit, and Trump, the eternal wheel of cope ever dictates that when the proles get it "wrong", it's because they're stupid/misinformed/racist. No person who is with a conscience and/or in full possession of The Facts could ever disagree with a progressive viewpoint. I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

It's Darkly Hinted at.

We know that the No campaign was funded and resourced by conservative and international interests who have no stake or genuine interest in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Rootless cosmopolitans, even!

Ayo how come OUR rootless cosmopolitans aren't based. Sucks we get stuck with the wrong KIND of international interests in our own back yard.

I'm only surprised that Russian interference wasn't cited.

Yeah about that..

"Nationwide demonstrations took place on Saturday purportedly organised by Simeon Boikov , an online commentator who posts anti-vaccine and pro-Vladimir Putin content."

And more

"Currently Simeon Boikov aka @aussiecossack is fronting the Russian information warfare strategy on the Voice Referendum. He is doing this by supporting the NO Campaign while holed up in the Russian Consulate and last week he was granted Russian citizenship by Russian President Vladimir Putin. "

"‘We don’t interfere’: Russian envoy on Voice debate"

"Moscow’s local envoy says he will not silence a pro-Kremlin conspiracy theorist who is organising rallies against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament while he is holed up in a Russian diplomatic compound in Sydney.

Russian ambassador to Australia Alexey Pavlovsky denied his government was encouraging Simeon Boikov – who goes by the online moniker “Aussie Cossack” – to undermine the Voice referendum."

This guy was on the front page of various Australian news sites in the days leading up to the referendum. Lots of vague gesturing towards Russian interference.

No, Australia's media is not like this. It's similar to America in terms of its partisan split (a large centre-left blob with some right wing counter-outlets), but less extreme and much more responsible in terms of the accuracy of its reporting. Most of the complaints about "misinformation" in the voice referendum refer to arguments like "this will divide us by race" - e.g. David Speers tried to nail down Julian Leeser on the Insiders program to "admit" that this was misinformation. But of course it's an entirely reasonable argument.

And of course the Yes campaign engaged in plenty of misinformation of their own, for example by touting that 80% of indigenous voters were in favour of the voice - relying on out of date polls from January-March while recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.

recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.

As far as I know, both sets of polls are sampling bias all the way down.

Graphs of the vote by locality show that places where you expect Aboriginals to live went pretty heavily "yes". Hard to tell how to translate that into a percentage-of-aboriginals, but 80% wouldn't surprise me. More importantly, this method is disproportionately sensitive to the votes of outback Aboriginals, which means it undercuts the idea that only city-dwelling elite Aboriginals supported the Voice.

I think the remote mobile teams in Lingiari are the most reliable indicators of outback Aboriginal votes, and they were indeed pretty high for Yes - around 73% on average. But of course outback Aborigines are a small minority of total Aborigines - and while they're the ones that we're most concerned about from a policy standpoint, that's tangential to the question of polling accuracy.

So I do think the evidence suggests that white Aborigines voted No more heavily than remote Aborigines did. That doesn't really surprise me - while the elite Aborigines are white, most white Aborigines are poor and working class. It can be simultaneously true that remote outback Aborigines and white urban Aborigines are very different from each other, and that the elite activist class is different from both of them.

I had to look up Lingiari to see that it was an electoral division. It’s huge, and yet the least populated division? I can’t believe that the middle of your continent is so…empty.

Yeah the Northern Territory is about 150k people and electorates are supposed to be about 120k people. So it can either be one overpopulated electorate or 2 underpopulated ones. They went with two, and one of them is basically just Darwin. Lingiari is everything else.

It's incredibly sparse in the interior. Durack is the biggest electorate, covering a huge chunk of Western Australia. It would be in the top 20 largest countries in the world if it were a country, bigger than Peru or South Africa. And it has less than 120k people.

I grew up in the outback, and unless you've lived there you just can't understand it. You have to do pretty much everything for yourself, because there's so few people around you to trade with to do it for you. Our closest neighbour was 40km away, the nearest town was 60km (and was just a few hundred people). Even the mailbox at our front gate was a 10km drive. Our farm was 2.5x the size of Manhattan, and it was one of the smaller ones in the area. The distances are just vast.

Question- do you tend to have large extended families on the farm, with maybe a hired laborer or two, or is it a one nuclear family plus a ranch hand operation?

It seems like this is set up for sons to live at home with their mail order brides well into adulthood, but it also seems like Australia has a culture not-particularly conducive to that.

One nuclear family, no employees, and the kids move to the city when they grow up.

What that means of course is that an incredibly empty part of the country is steadily becoming even emptier. For example this region of South Australia, more than double the size of Italy, with just 2573 people, and losing about 3% of their population each year.

Edit: Last year this property larger than Palestine sold for $34 million, or about $21 million in US dollars.

More comments

The sheer nebulousness of the Yes case made it hard to directly misinform, too. So many of the 'X is misinformation' articles I saw were of the 'The No campaign's speculative rebuttal of a potential aspect of the Voice is inaccurate since we've yet to establish what the Voice actually is/does'

I did feel that the Yes campaign came off as... a bit slimy, if that makes sense? Big on claimed moral authority, but not very willing to nail down specific points. It felt like being asked to vote not so much on a specific proposal, but on the vibe of the thing.

'The No campaign's speculative rebuttal of a potential aspect of the Voice is inaccurate since we've yet to establish what the Voice actually is/does'

This whole debacle sounds like an episode of The Thick of It but in Australia instead of the UK.

No, not really, but blaming Murdoch and News Corp for everything is a time-honoured strategy on the left, much as blaming everything on the ABC and complaining about its funding is a popular pastime on the right.

We know that the No campaign was funded and resourced by conservative and international interests who have no stake or genuine interest in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We know this funding supported multiple No campaigns that intentionally argued in varying directions to create doubt and fear in both non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities.

AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.

There has always been racism against First Nations people in Australia. It increased with multiple daily instances during the campaign and was a powerful driver for the No campaign. But this campaign went beyond just racism. ‘If you don't know - Vote No’ gave expression to ignorance and licensed the abandonment of civic responsibility on the part of many voters who voted No. This shameful victory belongs to the Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies and mainstream media.

It's funny because lots of people across the spectrum follow "if you don't know vote no" when it comes to referendums where I live. It caught me totally off guard to see that this was such a vehement point of contention in the Australian referendum.

It caught me totally off guard to see that this was such a vehement point of contention in the Australian referendum

Keep in mind though that before Dutton said it that was the case in Australia too. It became a point of contention when the yes vote realised common sense wasn't in their favour.

"If you don't know, vote no" is a completely sensible rule of thumb, and it's been used to great effect by the left side of politics here too. Paul Keating campaigned against John Hewson's economic reform agenda by saying "if you don't understand it, don't vote for it" and won what was widely considered to be an unwinnable election. The dummy spit about it in this context is entirely unreasonable.

This is especially the case because the reason why people "didn't know" is because the government refused to provide any relevant details, not because they refused to educate themselves. How many people would be on the voice? How would they be chosen? What sort of powers would it have? What issues would it deal with? Would its advice to government be public? There were no answers to any of this, no endorsed government framework, just "to be legislated later as the Parliament decides".

AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.

I'd be very tentative with this. 'Yes' might not have bought this election in particular but the fact there's money being thrown at it means they can continue bargaining. Who knows, maybe one day, unbeknownst to most, this particular issue might go on sale and if one side happens to have money in the pocket it's an easy buy.

I think this is a problem with the right in general where they don't have a positive affirmational stance to rally behind. Instead they lean on the implicit racism of the public. With how hands off the right is with cultural institutions it's just a waiting game until the Overton Window shifts far enough along that the publics implicit racism doesn't cut it. Or, of course, the demographics shift in such a way that the Abbo rallying cry gets carried along in a coalition of ascendent minority groups.

Your framing is basically backwards. People can be marginally swayed by advertising. The diminishing returns set in early. The issue will not "come up for sale" but people indeed may change their minds for exogenous reasons, at which point spending billions will still be a waste.

Of course, it benefits nobody in the political machine to notice that campaign spending is largely wasted.

Or, of course, the demographics shift in such a way that the Abbo rallying cry gets carried along in a coalition of ascendent minority groups

Australia not being majority white anymore will not be caused by aborigines, it will be caused by Asian immigrants who don’t care about the aborigines, don’t understand why they should be given more power, and don’t see them as impressive coalition partners.

I can't find solid figures showing how Asian-Australians voted - there's some evidence that Chinese-Australians intended to vote Yes at a higher-rate than Anglos, but there's also lots of grief about them not supporting it enough.

Anecdotally, when I talk to Australians of Asian background, the message I get ranges from "Why are you asking us? We didn't do anything wrong" to "Lol the Aboriginals were lucky we weren't the ones who conquered them", but I rarely hear a lot of sympathy for them.

I remember speaking to a woman from Hong Kong after we were told the usual (in my opinion inadequately-defined, meaningless) claim that Aboriginals are the world's "oldest continuous civilisation", and have "sixty thousand years of civilisation". She confessed to me afterwards that she doesn't believe that's true, because you need to have writing to be a civilisation. To be civilised, you need to be recording and reflecting on your history. In that light she had always been taught - and she continued to believe - that China was the world's oldest civilisation.

(Technically if you date by the invention of writing, well, it depends a lot on exactly what you count as 'writing' as opposed to pictures, pictographs, and so on, but it is a lot more debatable. China is running, but it's not the obvious leader.)

I mention that story just to note that the narratives that take hold among Anglo communities do not necessarily have much resonance for other people.

I wonder if this woman from Hong Kong’s opinion was straight ethnonarcisism or if she would be consistent- eg would she have been impressed with the knowledge that the cherokees are the only people who invented writing by imitation without having been taught it?

I think she'd be consistent, knowing her.

I just remember finding that conversation interesting in terms of the way we frame history and what we choose to value. She described learning history as a civilisational cycle, the narrative of unification and division that we see epitomised in the first line of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Human history goes out from and then returns to a centre, over and over. This seems like a very traditional Chinese way of thinking about it, and the influence of Marxism hasn't been able to fully change that yet.

By contrast, the way I feel I learned history as an Anglo, Western person was basically this - the story of a linear ascent, Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to Europe to Britain to America and eventually to space. Arguments about how a linear, progressive view of history is an Abrahamic innovation may be overstated but they're still at least partly true. Of the world's great civilisational or religious cultures, certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have clear beginnings, middles, and conclusions in the way they perceive history. This is much less the case in pre-Western-contact China or India. It likely also shaped Hegelian and thus Marxist historical narratives.

At the time I talked to this woman, we were finishing up a several-days-long workshop on Aboriginal culture, and one of the things the first Aboriginal teacher we met tried to impress upon us was that time is not seen like this in Australian Aboriginal culture. Maybe for Westerners it's a gradual rise, and maybe for East Asians it's an oscillation, but for pre-contact Aboriginal people it's flat. Time is flat. Nothing changes. The breadth of the land swallows you up. It's not so much that the same incidents play out over and over repetitively, but that there is just one incident and it never stops happening, and any appearance of change is merely incidental.

Now I do take that with a grain of salt, not least because I am intensely skeptical that anybody in the world actually knows how pre-contact Aboriginals saw anything, and at any rate Aboriginal worldviews have been profoundly altered by colonisation anyway. A lot of them I honestly suspect that most Aboriginal advocates of Aboriginal culture learnt that culture from Western, noble savage type stereotypes. Whatever traditional culture they had would have been passed down through oral tradition and community practice, and when those communities were split up and most of the oral tradition lost, so was the culture. So even Aboriginal people are probably bullshitting a lot.

But even so, I assign some credence to his perspective, even if only a little, and it makes sense to me to say that culture and perception of time influences how people see the world and thus how they behave. For instance, it seems intuitively reasonably that you need some notion of progression and the possibility of upwards change (whether you fit that into a linear or cyclical narrative, they both have this possibility) in order for things like long-term planning and innovation to make sense. Meanwhile if you think that your actions can't really change things, then it seems like it makes a lot more sense to be impulsive and act only for short-term reward.

I'm not really sure about any of this, and I'm just spitballing, but it would not surprise me if there are some cultural effects like this.

AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.

I believe this is true. This is from the end of August, but back then Yes23 had outspent all other groups by far, and they tracked 1009 Yes ads compared to 164 No ads. As of September the Guardian was running pieces about the No campaign spending four times as much on Facebook ads, but this is misleading - Yes spent far more on Google ads, and overall Yes spent far more - they note Yes23 spending 1.1 million, over ten times as much as the No-aligned Fair Australia. In particular as they got closer to the date, Yes spending on Facebook surged and easily outstripped No. AFR also notes Yes receiving over 26 million in donations.

It does rather bother me that in the face of the Yes campaign's considerably superior spending, institutional support, and visibility, that there is scaremongering around No. I remember spooky stories about No campaign consultants, or the terrifying fact that some people working for the No campaign are Christians. I find it rather surreal to attack the No campaign for working with a Christian marketing company, and to imply that there's something wrong working with 'a firm that specialises in fundraising for church groups', when the last I checked the Yes campaign was drowning in church support.

In the letter itself, there's the implication that 'conservative and international interests' are illegitimate. I'll concede the point around international interests (though I will argue that it is hypocritical for the Yes campaign to suggest that international voices should stay out), but surely Australian conservatives have every bit as much right to participate in the debate and to vote as anyone else?

(though I will argue that it is hypocritical for the Yes campaign to suggest that international voices should stay out),

You make an excellent point, but I cannot believe you missed the opportunity to reference Albanese getting Shaquille O'Neal to endorse the voice.

Even more ironic that Shaq was principally in town to be a gambling spokesperson for Pointsbet when he did so

Kind of surprised no one has blamed the outcome of the referendum on Russian hackers yet.

I am worried about the "misinformation and lies" narrative they a spruiking here. They have a proposed censors charter which does all the usual things the Europeans are trying, only worse.

The fact that merely disputing Yes narrative is being labelled "misinformation" by exactly the kind of people who likely will man the misinformation bureaucracy is a good example of why speech moderation always gets corrupted. But they government and the Green have no reason to care about that -- they have the numbers in Parliament to pass it, no matter what the rest of society thinks.

Happy Birthday Elon Twitter

We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.

Remember when the media pretended Twitter was about to die any day? Every single person in the media seemed to make that joke on every podcast they were on. And remember when they pretended that Threads was a legitimate threat to Twitter? Elon also seems to have outflanked the ADL by appealing to right wing Jews and they are coming to an uneasy truce. It seems like it's more or less the same a year ago except for the name change. Community notes is also a great change.

I didn't join in on the thread, but can retro a bit.

  • I had 85% certainty there'd be no major outages as a result of the layoffs
  • I was unsure if there would be a true centralization and loosening of speech restrictions
  • I assumed Elon would make some minor overcorrections towards conservatism/free speech or exposure of his biases

Overall, the supposed death of the platform has been wildly exaggerated and I still have to hear sniggers about how it's an irrelevant ghost town.

I've been pretty checked out as far as the day-to-day happenings are concerned, and I don't know how the site looks for someone who has an account, but the thing I'm most curious about as an occasional clicker of links to Twitter is when (if at all) they're going to fully commit to the X branding and start getting "twitter" out of their urls. When will twitter.com redirect me to x.com, rather than vice-versa?

The rebrand only started being rolled out this summer, so we're really only a few months into it. I understand they're probably hesitant to break a whole internet's worth of twitter.com urls and embed systems, but you have to rip the band-aid off at some point, right? If it's not going to be Twitter anymore, at some point it has to not be Twitter anymore.

I didn't weigh in in the original thread, but I'll count myself as having been slightly surprised that the site didn't suffer more critical functionality loss after the possibly-overzealous initial mass layoffs. Some people I was paying attention to on the matter last year were really emphasizing how many critical roles they thought were being naively cast aside as unnecessary. I haven't had a Twitter account in years so I can't speak on the user experience during the transition, but presumably the lights are still on and the site still works, so I guess I'll give that W to Elon. An impression I had was that there were some significant number of people who were let go in the initial wave who ended up having their position offered back to them. There are plenty of people in my information sphere who seem happy to get a dunk in on Musk whenever they can, though, so that might not have been an honest and nuanced appraisal of the situation.

My opinion of Musk is very low, I think he's essentially a fraud, so I don't have much hopes for his ability to improve Twitter.

Even if he does end up being a competent leader, I worry he will simply be unable to do much. It turns out Dorsey was a libertarian-leaning idealist all along, and he was unable to push his own company in that direction, and had to wait until retirement to actually start making idealistic noises again. If Musk does do anything, we're going to see another round of "No Clicks For Hate" or that WSJ article about Youtube that triggered the Adpocalypse.

I think the best case scenario we can realistically hope for is that he drives Twitter into the ground.

Too blackpilled, I thought the change of ownership wouldn't amount to anything tangible, but he is facing some of the pressures I predicted. The ADL led advertiser boycott happened, and though not perfect, he's holding on surprisingly well.

Some things I didn't predict, that stood out over the year:

  • Community Notes was a great idea, and for all the whining about misinformation from the powers that be, it actually does more to address the issue than anything I've seen from them.

  • Who would have thunk it, making tweets editable isn't actually rocket science.

  • Dropping, what was it, 80% of his workforce? Ballsy move, it's simultaneously crazy how well it worked out, and not surprising at all

  • Cutting off Substack was lame.

  • Sealing off access without a login was also lame. Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers. Combined with the previous point it feels like it marks the beginning of the "cyberpunk" era of the internet. Open access is no longer a given.

  • I don't think the rebranding hurt the company, but I have no idea what was the point of that.

Sealing off access without a login was also lame. Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers. Combined with the previous point it feels like it marks the beginning of the "cyberpunk" era of the internet. Open access is no longer a given.

Yeah this trend has been worrying me. At least I'm at the point where I'm already intentionally limiting my use of the internet.

The whole free with ads model is inherently corrupt and causes massive harm to society anyway, as far as I'm concerned. Just a massive constant pandemic of psychological attacks against consumers on a scale almost too large to fathom.

I actually don't mind the login requirement. Employers snoop. Of course you can still see someone's most popular tweets of all time, without logging in. So if you wrote something controversial but also massive hit, you may be in trouble.

I hadn’t thought of the potential causation from Twitter wall to Reddit and YouTube walls.

Is there a reliable way to dodge the Youtube countermeasures yet? I switched to Firefox, thinking it wouldn’t make it quite so easy for Google. Not sure if it worked or if YouTube just boils the water slowly on “new” consumers or devices.

I imagine the Pihole solution is still valid, at least.

Update your ublock origin filters, it fixes the YouTube BS.

Youtube was never able to stop Newpipe, they can't force ads on you, just make it more difficult to avoid them and hope the average user gets dissuaded from adblocking. If you want to persevere you will be able to, come hell or high water.

Some dude on drama mentioned all this anti-ablock stuff isn't all that bad because 1) Some people's time is worth a lot more and they're more likely to be technically competent/get someone technically competent enough to jump through the new hurdles, so in terms of value damage the hit is a lot less than if you look at it in pure time terms 2) the kinds of people who're going to end up watching extra ads because of this are so base that the slop they want to watch probably isn't any better than the ads themselves, so it doesn't hurt them much at all to show them ads.

The fix isn't even that hard. I use Firefox, so all I got was a dialogue box saying that adblockers weren't allowed, and even that went away when I blocked the element, which took all of 30 seconds. Of course, they could always come up with a way around it, but it seems like a losing battle, since the adblockers will always find a way around the restrictions. Trying to stop ad blocking is like the music labels trying to stop illegal downloading online. Yeah, you can temporarily make it more annoying, but you'll never eliminate it entirely. Music figured out a way around it by giving customers everything they wanted at a reasonable price, but YouTube picked the exact wrong time to do this, as first, they don't have a representative amount of content that people are willing to pay for, and second, people are already burned out enough on needing twelve subscriptions that they aren't likely to spring for number 13 if they haven't already. The ads have also gotten so intrusive that YouTube is nearly unusable without blocking them. Playing an ad at the beginning of a video always made sense, but the constant interruptions of multiple ads at a time shoehorned into content that wasn't designed around ads is a nightmare. To make matters worse, they now made it so you can't turn off autoplay without third party apps, so now it's on all the time. It really sucks if, like me, you like to watch videos while falling asleep, only to have a bootleg of the 2009 Super Bowl permeate your dreams because you were watching a football video and the autoplay always tends towards videos that are three hours plus.

I was using chrome before. First it was the dialogue box. Then that box got a short timer before you could close it. Then I think the timer started getting longer. Then it stopped being closeable at all…

Obviously, blocking an element solves all these problems, unless they stop serving the video entirely. I went ahead and bailed for Firefox, assuming the water would continue to boil. That worked well for a day or two. Then it started with the dialogue box. At this point I assume it will progress through the previous series until it reaches Stage 4 and metastasizes.

I think it’s clear that YouTube does a slow boil on new or “new” users. As a result, it’s encouraging to hear that blocking the element remains effective.

Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers.

I don't think this is a "Reddit follows where Elon leads" thing, I think they're all reacting to the same root cause. Borrowing suddenly became more expensive than it had been for a decade and a half, during which time a whole bunch of business plans involved loading up on cheap debt and playing with business models and focusing on growth with a vague notion of getting profit margins in the black eventually, and now those have to get replaced by flailing panicky attempts to make businesses profitable soon instead. Spending a bunch of money offering free services for years may just have been what the kids call a "Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon".

I don't think the rebranding hurt the company, but I have no idea what was the point of that.

He's been wanting to brand his stuff as "X" for decades. It seems pretty stupid to me. But Musk's life story is a series of "everybody told him that trying to do a thing would be stupid, then he did the thing and made billions of dollars from it" chapters, so I'm only like 90% confident here. On the other hand, this isn't a "make Starship from carbon fiber" sort of stupid idea, where you can test it and discover its flaws and pivot to something smarter without much loss; marketing is a lot more fuzzy than engineering.

Spending a bunch of money offering free services for years may just have been what the kids call a "Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon".

With apologies to Ned Flanders, indeed-ily doob-ily. The whole Internet did that good decade or so; there's a wonderful Hollywood-focused substack called The Ankler which has been covering the phenomenon's entertainment industry manifestations.

I'm increasingly convinced history will look back on the turn of the millennium and discover in Michael Lewis a prophet of the age on the order or Upton Sinclair or Thomas Paine.

I don't think this is a "Reddit follows where Elon leads" thing, I think they're all reacting to the same root cause.

I agree with this but think that the root cause is different. Specifically, I think that the root cause is generative AI datasets. In order for your massive database of text posts to have value, it can't be easily harvested for free by some random on the internet. This means there's a big incentive for people with these massive platforms to prevent automated scraping, because that prevents them from charging OpenAI/Meta/Microsoft for access to their data.

High confidence (75%): Twitter will continue to be a money pit.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitters-cash-flow-still-negative-ad-revenue-drops-2023-07-15/

Looking pretty good. For all the attention it gets, Twitter has never really been profitable

I doubt there's going to be a huge boost to freedom of discourse on twitter. Nor will there be a mass exodus - the cost of moving to a new platform (which platform, anyway?) is too high. In the mean time, Twitter's moderation practices will continue to be erratic and arbitrary.

Also looking good. Twitter's user base is reportedly shrinking, but it certainly hasn't collapsed (if it does, I think it is likely to be replaced by nothing/replaced by a balkanized collection of platforms).

there's a low-but-not-that-low (in the proud tradition of made up confidence levels: 33%) chance he tries something aggressive/ambitious and kills twitter. Here's hoping.

Well, he hasn't done it yet, but he's floated it a few times and subsequently been talked down, so I think this was roughly calibrated correctly.

Medium confidence (50%): Musk will try to divest himself from twitter in the next four years.

I have three more years, but so far I'd say this prediction is faring poorly. Musk doesn't seem to be trying to dump twitter (at least not publicly).

Also looking good.

"No boost of freedom of discourse" seems pretty wrong to me.

I didn't have much familiarity with Elon Musk at the time, but I was willing to give him the benefit of doubt given his successes with Tesla and SpaceX. I think this has borne out for Twitter from a technical perspective, because barring a few minor hiccups, I'm impressed at how reliable of a platform it has remained despite significant reductions in staff. The constant cataclysmic predictions over the last year seem obviously off-base.

I think the conflict of interest issue remains a serious problem. I wrote about the stark difference between Old Twitter's willingness to duke it out with censorious governments, compared to Musk Twitter's policy of acceding to takedown requests. Musk also flip-flopped from initially claiming his devotion to free speech includes the 'elonjet' account [Yes the tweet is still up though it has a Community Note, which remains Twitter's greatest feature, and Musk's deserves credit for not making his own tweets immune], only to change his mind afterwards. Musk has maintained a vendetta against Substack ever since they launched the Twitter-like Notes, and Substack links were initially prohibited outright for a few days (Musk claims Substack was "scraping" data or something) but they still don't generate any previews like other URLs.

That elonjet shift illustrates some of Musk's erratic behavior, because his argument for wanting to ban the account claiming that it provides "real-time doxxing", and in support of that argument he posted a video purporting to show a "crazy stalker" who had been following him as a result of elonjet (also claimed he was going to take "legal action" against the guy behind elonjet). He never provided any additional details of who this person was and how exactly elonjet was implicated, and the last update I was able to find was almost a year ago and says the apparent "crazy stalker" in the video was being treated as the victim by police (which of course isn't conclusive).

Because Twitter is now privately-owned, we don't have exact numbers on how well it's doing financially but the few indicators available indicate a significant decline in revenue from advertisers (the overwhelming source of revenue) apparently fleeing the platform. Musk claimed that advertising revenue was down as much as 60%, but it's hard to know how seriously to take that number since he revealed it during his feud with the ADL.

Musk appears to wants to shift away from a reliance on advertisers and towards a user subscription model. People can pay $8/month to get Verified status which (among other things) provides a visibility boost on the algorithm. The old Blue Check system was needlessly cloistered, and the other current Verified benefits are fine, but the pay-to-boost feature has been really annoying, because it more likely than not ends up artificially boosting inane posts no one would otherwise care about. Musk also wants a $1/year subscription to tweet, and claims paid subscriptions are how to prevent spam and bots but there are countless current examples of Verified accounts spamming everyone with t-shirt advertisements or hawking crypto scams.

We don't have exact numbers about "engagement" but as far as I can tell Twitter remains the haven for the journalistic class, despite their grumblings and promises to evacuate to bluesky/threads/mastodon.

I still believe that Musk is an extremely competent leader for engineering projects. His biographies paint him as someone able to wrest impossible results through what appears to be sheer will and stubbornness. His personality does not seem like a good fit for a social media company that has to wrangle conflicting directives from users, advertisers, and governments. It's difficult for me to imagine Twitter entering a new golden age under his watch, so I predict he'll either quit or significantly step back from his responsibilities. I can't imagine how a user paywall would stop the money hemorrhage, and I haven't seen any encouraging signs from him about a commitment to free speech (except Community Notes, which remains the GOAT).

Of course, I'll still use it.

I see that I had no involvement in that particular thread, and as a matter of fact I can't even recall if I had an (active) Twitter account at the time of the purchase.

I do recall strongly pushing back against suggestions made by some, with @2rafa being one I concretely remember, that Threads would either dismantle Twitter or grossly undermine its userbase. Given that Threads quickly devolved into a wasteland of brands going "How do you, fellow kids?" at each other, and the odd influencer who would be better served by keeping their mouth shut and making people suspect they were stupid instead of opening it and removing all doubt.. Yeah, I'm taking all the imaginary points for that one.

At any rate, I'm mostly content with Twitter, at least from the perspective of a lurker. I didn't rely on third party apps, so the withdrawal of the API wasn't as pissing off as it was when Reddit did it. Community Notes are great, and ought to be a feature in pretty much any social media. Right wing or contrarian accounts seem to be safe, and I also get a laugh out of people like Cremiuex and i/o confronting milquetoast liberals with uncomfortable hate facts and statistics. Sure, I'm not particularly right wing myself, showing up as a centrist on most surveys of political affiliation, but we're tugging on the rope in the same direction, to the extent that's inevitable when all incentives encourage polarization into two symmetrically opposed parties.

I'd rate it as a 7.5/10 experience, I can reliably doomscroll and get something more informative than Reddit out of it, and it's not like there's anything larger than the Motte I can point to as doing better in terms of quality.

Not much has changed. I don't think I participated in that particular thread but I am quite sure my opinion would be that nothing much would change.

Normalcy bias is a good starting point for any prediction and will outperform inexperienced forecasters.

I would say, in this case, there have been LOTS of changes.

  1. Twitter laid off 80% of staff with no technical degradation of the site, and in fact improved features!

  2. Much less censorship than before

  3. Advertiser boycott (perhaps showing that Twitter advertising was never actually effective)

  4. Blue checkmarks open to anyone willing to pay

I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was actually running a profit now. Sure, revenue is down. But costs are WAY down. I'm most of the way through the Musk biography. The dude is a maniac at cost-cutting.

I don't mean to claim that Musk has done literally nothing, but I remember distinctly at the time people here and in my social circles were making wild claims about how Twitter had weeks to live and I was pretty sure end users would see minimal changes.

Premium Twitter seems to be paying off. It was almost embarrassing or shameful at first to actually shell out for the blue check but more and more people are clearly doing that.

Grey Enlightenment has talked about this alot.

Premium users get a significant algorithm visibility boost, so seeing more of them doesn't necessarily mean there's more of them.

Okay. I've seem quite a few blue checks who don't seem to get any more engagement than if they had never shelled out for that. You can't get lower than zero likes or replies.

But maybe they're just really terrible at getting attention, or agreeing enough with any subculture of Twitter users. Premium gives them no boost.

I said is it gives them a visibility boost, not a boost to engagement. Back in the day, visibility was largely based on engagement. This has some issues like creating a paradox where no one sees your tweet unless someone sees your tweet, but it worked well enough. If I check the replies on a viral tweet nowadays, there's a barren wasteland of very low engagement tweets (0 likes/replies), but they still show up at the top because they're from Premium users. The complaint about pay-to-boost is precisely that it degrades the experience for users by showing them more uninteresting tweets primarily/only because the other person paid money.

How have your predictions fared?

Decently. Graded:

  • ✅ 99%: Trumps Twitter ban has been lifted
  • ✅ 95%: At least one case of Twitter moderation has happened for which the NY Times or WaPO has written a story highlighting hypocrisy
  • ✅ 90%: Hate speech rules for protected classes remain, neither being retracted nor expanded to cover everyone
  • ✅ 70%: Misgendering and deadnaming no longer fall under this category, however.
  • ✅ 70%: Payment processors, cloud service providers, banks, and the US government have NOT taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (This one is tricky to adjudicate so I'll leave it to you.)
  • ❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)
  • ✅ 60%: Twitter's medical misinformation rules have been modified.
  • ❌ 60%: Twitter's election misinformation rules have been modified.

Vibes-wise, I've been surprised by how full-throatedly dissident conservative Elon Musk has been in his tweets. And while "hate speech" is still against TOS, I've been subjectively impressed by how much far right accounts have been able to test the limits without being deleted, banned, or throttled from at least my feed.

❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)

I thought EU has started enforcing the new Digital Services Act, and Twitter was named one of the big platforms that need to comply?.

Tbf, the changes don't seem that intense. And they target everything from Google Search, Google Maps (?!), to Apple's App store, to Wikipedia (!), to Tiktok, to Amazon's app store... and to Twitter.

Did you mean that it wasn't specifically towards Twitter?

The EU is threatening to enforce the DSA against Twitter, and smart EU-watchers are saying they look serious, but they haven't got to the point of actually doing anything yet. So if the prediction had an explicit one-year deadline, it adjudicates as "false".

Twitter won't be removed for the same reason Fox News is still on every major cable package. It isn't some minor service, its the primary use case for the smart phone for tons of people.

Interestingly, I overestimated the resilience of Fox News. I still can't believe they forced out Tucker Carlson despite having the most popular show on cable news.

I still can't believe they forced out Tucker Carlson despite having the most popular show on cable news.

The popularity didn't matter because it couldn't be translated into dollars, thanks to the ad boycott.

Basically what happened to Glenn Beck.

How much of a hit did Fox take? I know it dipped in the short term, but I figured there wouldn’t be any major consequences, like getting dropped from packages. I don’t know what could replace it in the “boomer background noise” market niche. Not the streaming services.

I still can't believe they forced out Tucker Carlson despite having the most popular show on cable news.

Tucker was on tape saying that Trump lost in 2020 and Fox's coverage suggesting otherwise was deliberate lies. This was going to be played if the Dominion lawsuit went to trial. Being a legal liability on that scale is a sufficient condition for firing anybody.

They can all go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned they have literally NOONE left on that network even remotely close to being human. Gutfeld comes close but his writing staff is milktoast as fuck.

Pretty much all of them: The service is substantially shittier to use in general; and slightly shittier to use from a technical perspective.

The general shittieness has risen to the point where I actually use it much less.

Bluecheck morons getting top billing instead of whoever has the best one liner has killed my interest in using twitter as twitter; I now only use it to follow specific people for updates on scheduled appearances/articles/ FILTHY FUCKING PORNOGRAPHY.

I'm shocked by what a difference this makes. I went from scrolling for a couple mins. each time i checked my feed for the latest incredibly specific porn / current events in the Palm Oil Killings / when is video game coming out to basically never actually going deeper than the very top level of the thread.

He has turned it into a more expensive rss feed for me.

FILTHY FUCKING PORNOGRAPHY

If you’re serious about this, that’s disgusting. If you’re joking about this, that’s also disgusting.

If you’re serious about this, that’s disgusting. If you’re joking about this, that’s also disgusting.

If you're serious about this, it's textbook shaming, which is against the rules. If you're joking about this, you've failed to speak plainly, which is also against the rules.

This is a pretty minor infraction, all things considered, but... a little more effort, please.

I was being serious, for the record, and you're right, this is not an appropriate place to casually assert that pornography is disgusting anymore than 'x-ideology is bad' or 'y-group is out'. Warning deserved.

That does cede the ground to folks who casually think it isn't, however, like the guy to whom i was responding. shrugs

(I know, I know, all views from all places, etc. But just as a drive-by nazism or pedoism wouldn't be welcome, it'd be cool if porn was in the same category)

(I know, I know, all views from all places, etc. But just as a drive-by nazism or pedoism wouldn't be welcome, it'd be cool if porn was in the same category)

Interestingly enough, porn is in the same category--but it is porn that is in the same category, not conversations about porn.

Hell yeah brother!

He has turned it into a more expensive rss feed for me.

The most annoying thing about the changes is that they constantly get in the way of me using Twitter as an RSS feed. I used to have a feed reader attached to a local nitter instance, but the arms race between them and the Twitter login-only access kept blowing my setup up. Seems like things have finally gotten more stable, so I might try again.

FILTHY FUCKING PORNOGRAPHY.

Nice.

Community notes are awesome. Very often useful. Sometimes hilarious

I have mixed feelings on Community Notes. Indeed, they're very often useful and sometimes hilarious. In fact, almost always useful and very often hilarious from my experience. Yet it is also a way of putting the thumb on the scale in terms of the way information is communicated on Twitter. I'd prefer it if every tweet were to be judged on its own merits, with bad, misinforming, or even disinforming tweets being called out by other tweets made by other Twitter users, not by some big box placed below the tweet by official Twitter UI through the input of other Twitter users. Having that official box there just because a bunch of Twitter users wanted to put that box there is just tyranny of the majority. If some bad piece of information spreads like wildfire on Twitter because a misinformed tweet didn't get properly called out by other people tweeting, then so be it, that's Twitter working as intended, and I think the world in which that misinformation gets spread and misleads people is better than the world in which that misinformation gets suppressed by high-minded, well-intentioned authorities other users merely on the basis that they believe it's misinformation.

Yet, again, I've found Community Notes very helpful personally, as every time it's corrected a Tweet, and I've decided to do independent research, the Notes have ended up being the more correct one, often times actually correct while the tweet is actually incorrect. Hence the mixed feelings.

Having that official box there just because a bunch of Twitter users wanted to put that box there is just tyranny of the majority.

All the other forms of feedback - getting ratiod, getting dragged in quote tweets by high-clout accounts, etc - are also basically just tyranny of the majority. The problem is that if, say, the BBC posts something absurdly wrong, and a swarm of users points it in the replies, many people won't bother reading the replies, and even when they do official institutions will have a clout-shield by virtue of being official institutions. The reason Community Notes is awesome is that that official box lets the opinion of the common people be put on par with the mainstream media, NGOs, factcheckers, etc. This is why Elon is never getting any brownie points for fighting misinformation on social media, even though he probably did the most to stop it out of all SocMeds - none of it was ever about misinformation, but about imposing the official opinions on the common people.

I don't think I could have written a better steelman of the "pro-Community Notes" position than this. It is a highly convincing argument, but it's just one that I don't find convincing against the counterargument.

Which is that there's something meaningfully different about the "tyranny of the majority" that forms within the medium (Twitter in this case) due to the way people use it and gain reputation there and the one that forms when the medium itself puts a thumb on the scale. When BBC tweets some misinformation, people believe it not because Twitter gave them any sort of special privileges, people believe it because of the reputation BBC built off Twitter. The way to combat that is to give people a more accurate view of the reputation BBC deserves, both off Twitter and on Twitter by Twitter users using tweets. Twitter's role shouldn't be to adjudicate the truth value of a statement so that its users get a more accurate view of the world by the standards of Twitter and its community members, and neither should it be to manage the reputation or credibility of its users. Those are things that will play out naturally by people using Twitter for its role, which should be to be the dumbest, fastest, most reliable pipes in the world for delivering 140-character (280 to 10,000 now, but I'd prefer to go back to 140 - this isn't a key issue here, though) snippets to one's followers, with as little regard for what's in those snippets as possible.

If a bunch of Twitter users got together and made an organization to tweet out the equivalent of Community Notes and then manipulate their behavior to make the algorithm put their reply at the top of the view when seeing a tweet, I'd consider that just fine and things working as intended. The fact that Twitter itself blesses it and puts it in a special box whose mere presence says that Twitter itself decided to manipulate this Tweet to appear differently from other Tweets, because the contents of this tweet are wrong by Twitter's standards. That's Twitter putting their thumb on the scale.

Which is that there's something meaningfully different about the "tyranny of the majority" that forms within the medium (Twitter in this case) due to the way people use it and gain reputation there and the one that forms when the medium itself puts a thumb on the scale.

I get where you're coming from. If I remember right the predecessor to Community Notes was a very similar infobox that Twitter slapped onto one of Trump's tweets, my argument against was exactly what you outline here. I think there's a difference between that, and what Community Notes has become. By making it democratic it is no longer a thumb that Twitter-the-company is putting on the scale, it's just an extra meta layer added onto the game, any user, including the BBC can participate in it, downvote the notes they don't like, or add their own. I'm fine with the mechanism as long as it remains relatively evenhanded the way it is now, but if you prefer OG Twitter, I can respect that too.

Regarding X/Twitter, as a dissident rightist I did a random thought experiment a couple of months ago but never posted in anywhere so far. It might be somewhat relevant here.

Let's suppose that whatever moderation policy X currently has is replaced basically by this:

  1. Any sort of political agitation, regardless of the party, movement, platform, umbrella organization, candidate, nominee, NGO etc. it is done on behalf of, or against, is banned.
  2. Any incitement towards political violence, or political use of the threat of violence as blackmail, is banned.
  3. Doxxing is banned.

How long would it take for X to be dismissed in mainstream discourse as a haven for Nazis? A couple of days?

Item 1 seems impossible to realistically enforce. If someone posts a selfie that has a pride flag in the background, is that political? If someone argues that the Bible forbids homosexuality, is that political?

Yes and yes.

It seems like everything is political if the standard is "can be interpreted as related to a political issue." Posting a picture of yourself wearing Nikes would be political because Nikes are made in sweatshops. Posting a picture with your kids is political because the decision to have or not have kids is politically salient. Etc.

One potential problem of assessing any levels of platform stability, is that most large tech companies have incredibly strict starting standards for tech uptime and reliability, so sometimes even a 10x or even 100x change in platform stability might still be completely unnoticeable to a regular end user. Imagine a platform going from 1 minute of downtime a year to 100 minutes. Even 1000 minutes of downtime might be hard to notice depending on when it happens and for what features it happens to.

However, someone is usually going to notice some downtime, and Musk owning the platform meant that bugs on twitter suddenly became newsworthy events, rather than things everyone would just ignore and not care about. So even if overall bugs and uptime remained the same, there might easily be a large change in the number of news stories and people's level of awareness of those bugs.

I would not be surprised if platform stability got significantly worse, but also that most tech companies overspend on platform stability as a point of professional pride and bragging rights. So whether you notice is probably determined by whether you follow bad news about twitter, or how much you blow up the importance of the one or two rare downtime incidents you personally encounter.

Yes, I used to work at a small tech company a long time ago and they advertised the uptime for their API in decimal places after 99% with 99.999% being the goal back then.

I didn't make any predictions, but my experience is that the site feels mostly the same, except Community Notes are the best feature on any site ever, I get noticeably less random follows from botted onlythot accounts, and people screech about the site dying a whole lot more (while continuing to use it).

I agree that the UX is similar (apart from the login to read tweets requirement, which cost me 10 minutes setting up a dummy account), and not enough of the people whose tweets I want to leave have left to woker social media for it to affect me. There are two things I find mildly annoying:

  • Ads no longer look like ads, which makes them harder to ignore.
  • My default feed includes more shit-tier right-wing trolling being manually boosted by Musk (either by retweeting it himself, or by boosting accounts like the proudly foecal CatTurd). The political tweeters I follow are mostly intelligent right-wingers, precisely because I don't want to have to wade through feline excrement.

Frankly, anyone who uses the For You feed instead of the Following feed deserves everything they get. I actually installed a browser thingy to elimnate the For You feed in its entirety. In addition, you can block those accounts if people you do follow regularly rt them, so meh.

I also feel as though my experience is mostly the same, although I'm a "read only" twitter user and mostly follow art bots. The community notes have been generally great, and a good example of how the response to bad speech is more speech rather than censorship.

I don’t have a twitter account, mostly for my own sanity. One of the worst new features is that if you are not logged in to twitter you cannot get a chronological feed of an account, it sorts by most popular, which is more than useless. (You can change it if you’re logged in).

Also, unless you’re logged in, you can’t click on a link to a twitter comment and read the replies. Only the actual tweet is displayed.

On the other hand, This has caused my twitter usage to go down to less than a minute a week, which is great.

You can take any twitter url and replace twitter.com with twitter.com and get more or less the old experience without having to sign in. There are some companies that use twitter to post status message when there is an outage etc. and this has been helpful for me.

FYI, the forked code base running this site will autocorrect twitter links to nitter or vice versa depending on settings. So right now your comment says replace <url> with <same url>.

If you click on view source you can still see the original version.

Does this remind you of anyone?

I am glad to hear the Governor call it desert -- it is desert -- it is pretty good desert.

It is good to be back again in Nevada and get a chance to see things again. It seems to me they look a lot better than they did a few years ago and as you know, your Government in Washington knows that this State is on the map which is something. Some administrations didn't know it was on the map. And, I have been very glad that your State administration, from your Governor down, work so well with all of us on the other side of the continent. We have had real cooperation from the State Government. We have not had any dissention or cross words, and when all of us decided things had to be done, they have been done.

You people know I am water conscious -- although not a strict prohibitionist --

When I was down on the Ohio River the other day I told them I would catch bigger fish than grew in Ohio, though I don't think I will get anything that tastes better to eat than Nevada trout -- the Senator gave me some Nevada trout for lunch -- it was delicious.

It is good to see you all and I hope to get back here again some day. I hope some day to come in an automobile and stay longer and get to know you better.

It is good to see you.

I elided the header, which specified that these were "INFORMAL REMARKS OF THE PRESIDENT, From the Rear Platform of his Special Train" spoken on July 13, 1938. Consider these remarks, spoken by the most aggressive Democrat in history. Compare them to the informal, off-the-cuff manner of our previous President, Donald Trump. Sure, the occasional choice of words is unfamiliar. But the rest is all there: glittering generalities. Praise for those on board. Rambling anecdotes. All these ghostly remnants of what must, at the time, have been raw charisma.

People like to feel listened to. They like to feel part of a conversation, and be reminded that the person is a real human rather than an unfeeling automaton. The kind of performance which successfully conveys that humanity doesn't always translate so well to a recording or especially a transcript. In the 30s, FDR was winning over the populace with informal remarks and fireside chats. Today, a politician can still cultivate that relationship with his base. But every casual remark is a risk. It will be carefully catalogued, preserved in cheap and ubiquitous recordings, and mined for any advantage. When a detractor watches a 15-second clip on evening TV, there is no suspension of disbelief. None of the casualness with which we'd listen in person. It's not just "two screens." It's one team watching a screen, and one holding a conversation.

I remember reading some accounts that Bill Clinton had an uncanny level of personal charisma that people who hadn't met him just didn't get. I think it's probably a more general quality of today's rigorously competitive political world. Maybe that's why politicians so often come off as incompetent or fake, that they're selected so strongly for personal charisma it leaves no room for other qualities.

My favorite Clinton anecdote is that Newt Gingrich needed a chaperone to meet with Clinton because every time he went in alone he got charmed and gave Clinton whatever he asked for.

Bill Clinton (né William Jefferson Blythe III) might not have fallen too far from the tree. His biological father was a traveling salesman who married Bill's mother while still legally married to his 4th wife. He died in a car wreck before Bill was born. I wonder if we'll find the charisma gene?

I suggest getting serially married men and successful salesmen together and giving them all dna tests.

My favorite Clinton anecdote is from TNR or maybe the New Yorker a while back. Doctor said, “Bill Clinton loves to talk; a friend of mine once got chance to meet him when they were both in the locker room of a racquetball club in Manhattan, and enjoyed the first hour of the conversation, but ended up faking a phone call from his wife as an excuse to prevent the chat from entering hour three.”

I suspect the surviving Bush and Obama might both do the same thing—just imagine being the top 0.001% for ambition and extroversion, with decades of life left, and every single job in America would be an embarrassing step down.

In my experience most high-level US politicians have an unreal level of charm in person that is almost impossible to fully describe unless you've experienced it firsthand. I've met several politicians who I intensely disliked from afar, only to find myself instantly charmed by them in person. Never met Clinton, but he probably takes this to another level.

Also my experience. Even Newt Gingrich, possibly one of the least charismatic politicians I can readily think of, was quite a bit more charming than the average Joe when meeting him in person.

Years ago, my uncle met Clinton very briefly and later remarked that Clinton had this incredible power to make you believe that he really cared about you, yes you, personally, even if you were just one person in a queue of hundreds taking turns to shake his hand.

Having met Bill Clinton in a random and non-political situation, I can say that this is spot on. Guy was on the way to Chelsea’s bday party or something and I remain convinced that he would have preferred to stand there chatting with me instead.

Having a very quick hunt for similar anecdotes, I found one of Gillian Anderson who was convinced on the basis of a 30-second interaction that she would get a message from him the next day to meet again.

She didn't.

Not to be crass, but Anderson is way more attractive than Monica Lewinsky. No accounting for taste, old Bill.

His loss.

So he's the real life Carrot Ironfoundersson.

Motivated by a Manifold market on whether racism is bad [1], I thought it might be profitable to argue the opposite. Alas, having drafted my argument, I don't think it is appropriate to post in a place where my ID is tied to my real name. So here is an argument, advocatus diaboli:

Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family. What I discovered living in a foreign culture is that people tend to have an ingroup bias to their own ethno-cultural group, and Westerners call this racism. It is easier to communicate with people of shared language, and people of the same cultural background will have shared interests. People of shared ethnic group are more likely to share values, and more likely to agree on topics political and personal. This isn't even a conscious thing: in my experience people of a shared ethnic group are even more likely to make strong eye contact with each other.

The bias is similar to how (most) people have an ingroup bias for their own family: I don't see my siblings often, but when we meet we connect strongly, and discover inadvertently that we face similar challenges and overcame them in similar ways. If my sibling confesses to me of a misdemeanor, I am not likely to hold it against them, and if they confessed to me a felony I'm not sure I would report them. If they are in need, I would help them with minimal complaint, and although we disagree vehemently in politics, we still love each other. My family is my ingroup. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things are.

Now at the social level, that ingroup bias for family has its drawbacks: nepotism is common and harms society as a whole, and as I would be willing to help my sibiling get away with a crime, so does that closing of ranks around family horrific enable horrific acts, domestically, in the wider society, and even at the level of public policy and the economy. However, on balance the ingroup bias for family is a great thing (there is a reason why evolution has selected for it!). People take care of each other, they love each other, loneliness is diminished, and we trust each other more.

This is also what I see as an outsider in the foreign culture: people take care of each other, they love each other, they find companionship with each other, and they trust each other more because they share ethnic and cultural bonds. And while those bonds disadvantage me as a foreigner in their society, they have provided an evolutionary advantage, and I can't deny envying them life in the hamlet their forefathers made.

[1] https://manifold.markets/levifinkelstein/is-racism-bad

"Racism" is an anti-concept. It is a word of activist power. It groups a whole bunch of unlike phenomena together, and then the people who can use the word can equivocate on the definition in order to target the people they want to target for shaming and cancellation.

An example of the game plan is:

  1. Create an association in the public between the word "racist" and images of white people throwing stones at black children and calling them horrible names.
  2. Include in the definition of a racist "a person who believes in the superiority of one racial group, such as a group being more intelligent"
  3. Then using that definition, call people like Charles Murray or Steve Sailer "racists" since he arguably fits definition 2) even though they are the farthest thing from definition 1).
  4. Cancel Charles Murray and Steve Sailer, since their ideas are a huge threat to the $2 trillion dolllar education-industrial complex.

Another way of saying this is that "racism" is any idea that opposes the current left/center-left establishment ethnogensis or ethno-preservation projects. So if you are against busing ethnic Polish and Irish white kids to black neighborhood schools, you are against a certain ethnogensis project, and therefore racist. If you are against historically black universities, or against a law making certain hair styles a protected characteristic, you are against a certain ethnology-preservation project and therefore racist. If an asian-American mom wants her daughter to marry an Asian guy, that is irrelevant to any establishment plans, so the establishment does not care and does not consider the mom a racist.

It is rather annoying how certain activists have destroyed the meaning of the word. I used to really dislike being called racist, because I had the association with item 1. Now I just kind of sigh and think to myself "welp I guess they wanted to end the conversation". For many non-leftists the term has basically come to mean "a person the left doesn't like". I suppose your definition is more nuanced, but it amounts to the same thing.

It does make me a little more hopeful in a weird way. Language can only be abused so much, and only for relatively short term gains. And often at the expense of long-term progress. Genuine "I hate X race" type people can now get relatively far in politics, either by hating the correct race, or by the fact that the accusation of racism has been so overused that no one treats it seriously anymore. For anyone who actually cares about racism this is undeniably a bad thing. For anyone that was just using it as a weapon to bludgeon their opponents, well they probably benefited overall, but the weapon has become more and more useless. No one even bothers calling Trump racist anymore, but for anyone that doesn't remember it was thrown around quite a bit back in 2016.

It is rather annoying how certain activists have destroyed the meaning of the word....Genuine "I hate X race" type people can now get relatively far in politics

Eh, good riddance. Anyone who has is acting in morally deplorable ways relating to race can be condemned in language and terms and concepts that long predate the word "racism." Just call out what they are actually doing that is bad -- whether it is being slanderous, committing detraction, or covetous or whatever the bad thing actually is.

Meanwhile, as I read more history, I find that a lot of the "classic" racism that was universally abhorred before the "great awokening" (for instance school segregration) was not as clearly wrong as I thought it was. Read for instance Wolter's The Burden of Brown. I don't blame the white parents of any school district from using whatever laws they had at their disposal to keep their school from being overrun by a population with much higher rates of committing assault and with entirely different cultural norms and with incompatible levels of pedagogical needs.

I mean, I also don't blame individual parents trying to privilege their own kids at the expense of other people's kids.

I don't blame people for acting rationally under situations of conflicting interests or coordination problems, in general.

That's most of the reason we need a government and public policy in the first place, to try to push situations like that towards global optima that can't be found from individuals acting in their personal interest.

It's far from obvious that it's globally beneficial to create a situation where two groups are both underserved and where they each form negative opinions about members of the other group.

Sure, public policy is difficult and complicated.

I was talking about the structure of the overall system, not the details of a specific policy.

I think people are too often conflating morals with fact.

Take "discrimination", in my opinion a superior word to racism alone, though I might accept "vanilla racism" or depending on context its weaker cousin "stereotyping": when someone is treated different because of their race being used as a primary differentiator. We've become so distracted as a society arguing about whether or not it's accurate or occasionally acceptable to make judgements or get caught into debate about if it was really discrimination or some other cause that we forget to say what really needed to be said because the rest is just window dressing: It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them. Whether it's even possible to do this, or what counts as getting to know them, or any other derivative question is irrelevant. It's morally wrong not from any practical perspective, but rises from basic human dignity and fairness.

The parents in your example, I might initially be tempted to say, are acting logically -- but only to an extent. They are treating school decisions as very short term, zero-sum games which in a sense they are. However, with longer time horizons and a bit of agency, it's harmful to assume it's all just zero-sum and instead should be seeking out more effective solutions. We live in a society, as they say. But this is all beside the point. The real point is that we seem to have inadvertently de-emphasized and cheapened our definition as well as understanding of human rights. The right to be treated equally is one of the absolute fucking basics, and is not worth fucking around with just because we're tempted to get some short term benefits.

They are treating school decisions as very short term, zero-sum games which in a sense they are.

It was actually a negative sum game. Especially by the 70s, the whites were not actually hoarding any resources. So when you forced integration you made schools terrible for the whites because the kids were getting assaulted and the teachers were distracted by teaching students who were at a lower grade level, and you made the schools no better for the black kids. The forced integration made things worse for everyone in ways that were obvious and predictable, but the people pushing it were so inflamed by self-righteousness that they did not care, it was those leaders pushing integration who were morally in the wrong.

harmful to assume it's all just zero-sum and instead should be seeking out more effective solutions.

Like what? You don't just get to advocate for a situation where girls were getting sexually assaulted in the halls and then say, "well, they should have figured some other solution and then we wouldn't have to forced integration" and then get to take the moral high ground. Let's be very clear here because the rest is just window dressing: deliberately creating a situation where education is impossible because of kids constantly being assaulted and bullied is morally wrong, all the time, in every society. The situation created by forced integration was worse, and the people responsible were morally in the wrong, far more in the morally wrong than the people who supported the segregated status quo.

It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them.

"Arbitrary" and "treat worse" are tricky here. It is morally wrong to overtly mean or aggressive against someone who has not wronged you. However, it is morally permissible to withhold charity, or withhold generosity, or withhold sharing, or withhold your friendship, or withhold permitting someone to migrate into your terrirtory, or withold wanting your children to raise my children (which is what school is) based upon limited, imperfect information -- such as ethnicity/race, or religion, or politics. Race, like family, or like in many cases religion, is not something a person chooses to be born into, but it is not exactly arbitrary either. Race is tribe, it is a measure of closeness of blood relations, it is not arbitrary, and something that is quite often relevant.

It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them.

This statement is wrong on so many levels.

You conflate treating someone differently with treating them worse. It can actually treat them better on average if the needs of members of the group differ from other groups. The entire idea that something is always better or worse is silly black/white thinking anyway. If you ask a person whether they eat pork before setting up an event with food, you treat them worse if they do eat pork, because you are wasting their time. If they don't eat pork, you probably treat them better if you do ask. And it is perfectly plausible that asking by default is a net-negative for let's say a church event, where the main groups that don't eat pork are self-selected out, but it is a net-positive for an event where the group that you ask contains a certain number of Jews/Muslims.

You also beg the question by assuming that race or other differentiators are arbitrary, even though they clearly are not. Culture differs by race. Biology differs by race. Stereotypes typically do reflect actual statistical differences. Very often, people consider actually it morally wrong if you don't treat them according to their stereotypes. Try treating women like you treat men. It offends them.

You also ignore that getting to know people and tailoring policy to them personally has a substantial cost, may not be possible and can be open to abuse.

Language can only be abused so much, and only for relatively short term gains. And often at the expense of long-term progress.

I think this is the reason "white supremacy" became such a common descriptor in the 2010s: activists recognised that there was no alpha left in "racist" as a term of abuse, the word having become as inflated as a Zimbabwean dollar.

The problem for them now is that accusing someone of being a "white supremacist" is heading the same way (doubly so now that it's become so obvious that even being Indian offers no protection against the accusation), and woke people are fast running out of words with which to tar their political opponents that inspire the same level of outrage. "Racist", "Nazi", "fascist", "white supremacist" - are there any such descriptors left which haven't been rendered meaningless through overuse?

I think it was more an issue of conceding to right-wing complaints about 'individual bias' and 'systemic inequity' both being refereed to with the same word ('racism'), and trying to actually separate the two by calling individual beliefs that one race is superior or individual efforts to intentionally favor one race 'supremacy' instead of 'racism'.

Which of course didn't work at all to mollify conservatives who claimed to hate how the same word was being used to refer to different things. What they actually hated was just being smeared in general; the fact that the terms used to do so were being used confusingly was never more than a 'gotcha'.

No, I don't think that's remotely true. When have woke people ever made "concessions" to conservatives of any kind?

I didn't say 'woke people', and I don't know precisely who you would or would not include under that classification.

I'm talking about major media outlets and politicians and the like who were using 'white supremacy' for a while. They make concessions to conservatives all the time

Thanks for clarifying.

I had Belisaurius accuse me of being an anti-Western racist recently.

The outrage, can't anyone with eyes see I'm a pro-Western racist? Can't really help it, there's no way I'm being convinced that HBD isn't true without brain damage, for much the same reason I believe in the existence of the chair I'm sitting on.

Yeah, people can call me racist all they like, I don't particularly care, and at least in India most people would react to such opinions with a "duh" rather than controversy.

A function mirrored by terms like 'woke' or 'socialist/communist' on the right.

I think that we should not be so quick to throw out the useful-definition-of-the-term baby with the misuse-by-cynical-activists bathwater in each of these cases.

It's true, on the one hand, that 'racist' gets used inconsistently and imprecisely by activists on the left to smear opponents or apply 'the worst argument in the world' to things they dislike.

It's also true that there are a specific set of well-defined and useful meanings of the term, that are used honestly by many serious people and are important tools in the intellectual toolbox for anyone who wants to discuss these topics.

In general, if we threw away every term or philosophy or position that was misused or misapplied by cynical activists, there wouldn't be anything left to talk about in the Culture War Thread at all.

Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group, like an ingroup bias for one's own family.

Except when it's an ingroup bias for people who share superficial characteristics with your ethnic group (e.g. skin tone).

I know the definition has been tortured into an inch of its life but that classic element is still a thing and is not covered by your 'social capital' defense.

You are very much giving a 'Motte'/steelman version of 'racism' that bears little resemblance to the actual concept in practice, and bears more resemblance to other more appropriate words such as 'kinship'.

In practice, racism obviously is not just positive feelings/actions towards your kin, but (centrally) negative feelings/actions towards others, including everything from mistaken beliefs about their attributes and capabilities to denying their fundamental human rights and dignity to slavery/mass murder/etc.

Inherently, I think that if something doesn't bias you towards inaccurately negative beliefs or unendorsedly negative actions towards members of an outgroup, it is non-central to call that something 'racism' (of the individualized type you are describing here, leaving aside systemic definitions).

Racism is just the expression of an ingroup bias for one's ethnic group,

Except, of course, that classically it isn't; rather, it the expression of outgroup bias against particular groups. And, a particular outgroup bias at that: the belief that said outgroup is inferior, or polluting, or both. Laws requiring the segregation of water fountains was not simply an expression of ingroup bias. Nor were laws requiring segregation of cemeteries, nor were laws that excluded members of certain groups from state institutions of higher education, nor laws that, when those higher ed exclusions were held unconstitutional, "required [students who were members of a certain race] to sit apart at a designated desk in an anteroom adjoining the classroom; to sit at a designated desk on the mezzanine floor of the library, but not to use the desks in the regular reading room; and to sit at a designated table and to eat at a different time from the other students in the school cafeteria.".

Except, of course, that classically it isn't; rather, it the expression of outgroup bias against particular groups.

I think the point is that the outgroup bias follows the ingroup bias: "In order to protect/provide for my ingroup, it is useful to stigmatize the outgroup."

I don't see where OP says that, but besides, ingroup bias is essentially universal, but outgroup hostility is much less so

Pretty much all legitimate justifications for racism rely on inaccurate proxies for other things we actually care about. I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.

Since I am white and was raised by white parents among mostly other white people, I can reasonably expect that the average white person is more likely to be similar to me than the average black person. We'll be more likely to have similar cultural knowledge, values, habits, etc. But my black neighbor who I actually know and happens to be a christian pastor has way more in common with me than the average white Californian.

In the past race was a very strong proxy for nationality, culture, and loyalty. In modern times it is a weak signal unless you live in a predominantly monoethnic country.

I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.

This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.

The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

Of what? If I meet a black pathologist, knowing that they're a pathologist tells me much more about them than knowing that they're black.

Likewise, if I see a white junkie, knowing that they're a junkie tells me much more about them than knowing that they're white.

I think you're not reading the parent's comment correctly.

Race carries an immense amount of residual predicting power. Example: Compared to a white pathologist, a black pathologist is less likely to enjoy country music.

The parent never said anything about whether race or profession has more predictive power, only that race continues to have predictive power even after we've corrected for everything else.

By “residual value after controlling for other predictors”, I meant something like, if you have two pathologists, one of them being black tells you something additional on top of the fact of him being a pathologist, eg. that they are likely to be less competent at their job than their white counterpart.

This sort of stuff makes me feel bad for all the competent black pathologists, they have to pay the price for their affirmative action'd racial bretheren (who if they are a different type of African than the pathologist may well be just as genetically different from the pathologist than your average white pathologist).

"White and Asian medical school applicants discriminated against; black doctors most affected."

I don't feel bad, especially since most competent black pathologists were likely able to attend a more desirable medical school than they would have in the absence of affirmative action. I feel bad for the Asian and white applicants who had to attend a less desirable school as a result of affirmative action, or didn't get into one altogether. I feel bad for patients roped into getting treated by affirmative action doctors, except those patients with in- or out-group preferences for groups that are affirmative action-beneficiaries.

Essentially: it's the asterisk on the Harvard degree.

Sure, it tells you something "extra", but it's something both immoral and, while perhaps it might in a very localized way be a net benefit in terms of information gain, it's long-term super unhealthy and harmful. I mean, if we're leaving the immoral part to the side and talking about pure utility, making a habit of utilizing those residual values (even assuming they are reliable) is problematic both for you and for society both in the medium to long term. Why? I don't think I need to explain the societal part, as societally accepted racism even when used as a background process rather than a primary process is a significant evil and limits overall prosperity and tends to hinder interpersonal and economic interactions in disproportionate ways - but personally there's harm too. Racism has such a virulent and problematic history that I don't think we can rely on ourselves to "limit" racism to merely residual value only. It's a pipe dream. Our brains simply don't work that way.

There is little substance in your comment other than repeatedly claiming that racism is bad because it’s immoral, and it’s immoral because it’s evil, and it’s evil, because it’s problematic. If taking race into account when making consequential decisions about reality is considered racist, even if we only do it to the statistically justified extent, then I simply don’t agree about it being gravely immoral, because we do the exact same thing with hundreds of other characteristics all the time without an ounce of queasiness, eg. cultural origin, or education history, or density of facial tattoos, or clothing worn.

Your best argument here is where you claim that it’s too easy to assign more weight to this piece of evidence than it is actually warranted. This is true, but this is also true about other characteristics, discriminating based on such does not get such a privileged treatment, so why should I care much?

This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race

Can you give an example where the race prior isn't mostly insignificant? "Avoiding black guys more than you would white women when walking down the street" - justified or not, doesn't matter that much either way - violent crime against random people is pretty rare, and avoiding black people a little more does basically no harm to them. Hiring someone for a job, in an ideal colorblind world you can just give them an IQ test or judge how intelligently they talk.

All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence. Maybe you start 7% vs 33% that a random white vs black man is a violent criminal, and then if you learn they dress well and speak proper English it drops to 4% vs 5%. Or if you learn they have anger problems and are covered in tattoos it might go to 55% vs 60%. Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.

I agree with you that for random people on the street signals are more costly than they're worth and race can be useful as a quick hack to ballpark guess, I said as much in my previous post. But none of this implies that it

carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

It only serves value in that it lets you guess at the direct predictors more quickly and easily than costly signals would. No priors carry immense amounts of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors. That's what makes them priors. The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly. Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.

All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence.

Yes, but this does not address my argument that in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.

Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.

It’s the other way around. When you use race as evidence, you don’t do it by sequencing the DNA of the subject. No, what you do in practice is precisely using a socially constructed race as a proxy to make predictions IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing. You can’t cheaply get a lot of specific evidence about the latter, but you can use race stereotypes (which are pretty accurate) to infer these quite cheaply.

The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly.

Which is exactly the case in majority of the situations. Indeed, you apparently agree:

Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.

So where is the disagreement, exactly?

So where is the disagreement, exactly?

The way you phrased things, and still to some extent now, seems to be implying that race is always useful because information is too costly. My premise is that information is costly up front for strangers but accumulates automatically over time such that race becomes less and less useful the more you interact with the same individuals. If you agree with that entirely then I guess we don't have a disagreement other than with phrasing of things, but the fact that you phrased it the way you did makes me suspect that there is some underlying disagreement even if I'm not sure what it is. Because I wouldn't say that the existence and importance of friends and coworkers whom you can accumulate significant amounts of information on over years are compatible with

in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.

The usefulness of the prior asymptotically approaches zero over time such that, although it might never literally reach zero, after a couple years of knowing someone it's probably close enough to ignore (though this will vary by how much you actually interact with the person, since knowledge is not gained via the literal passing of time.)

Or maybe we both entirely agree on its usefulness in both the stranger case and the friend case but you are considering the stranger case to be "typical" and I am considering the friend case to be "typical" and we are each dismissing the other as an exception to the rule.

I think it’s a sort of dose-makes-the-poison thing for me. Being biased towards your own group, whatever that group might be is actually not only normal but healthy in normalish amounts. There’s nothing particularly wrong with preferring your own tribe or your own culture above others. In fact I think there’s something pathological about antipathy towards your own tribe, your own religion or culture.

I guess my gestalt image here would be either the Otaku or the Wigger— a white person with so much interest in another culture that it becomes a joke or a meme. They rejected everything white in favor of being something else. They spend time and energy and lots of effort to become a superficial version of a member of that culture without really understanding that those cultures will never truly accept you as one of them. At best they see it as cute, at worst they see it as a derogatory LARP.

The same could be said of the anti-racist penchant for declaring things to be the result of white supremacy and making huge grandiose public statements in apology and self-degradation. It’s not really as impressive as it’s made out to be, at best it’s cute, and at worst it comes off as a cringy LARP.

On the other hand being discriminatory in your behavior, or actually getting in the way of others getting a fair chance at living a decent life, that’s too far. Like Europe and North America are Christian civilizations there’s nothing wrong with promoting that heritage through art or music or literature or whatever else you want to use. Italy is Italian and I see little wrong with Italians embracing everything it means to be Italian. To me I find that to be much more respectable— even if I practiced a different religion or came from another culture, finding that the natives are not afraid to practice their religion or culture in public, that they actually like their people, country, and so on. Self-respect is something that other people will respond to with respect.

In fact I think there’s something pathological about antipathy towards your own tribe, your own religion or culture.

It is sad in some ways, but also admirable in others. It's what cultural diffusion looks like. One culture can definitely be better adapted to an environment than another. It's like the old saw about who would win a fight: a lion, or a shark?

Yes, up to a relatively low point, but we get into definitional territory around such a flexible term as "racism". As others have noted, noticing reality isn't racism, and neither is normal ingroup behavior.

Personally, I don't consider normal ingroup bias, nationalism, regional bigotries etc. to be "racism" proper, even if they map onto particular races. Nor do I consider stereotypes, insofar as they reference real phenomena, to be racism. I know many people disagree with this, but since everyone else gets their own bespoke definition, I might as well use my own.

If we define "racism" strictly as the belief that a particular race has less moral worth as a group than other groups, I don't support or advocate it.

I do think every culture needs a bit of ingroup bias if it is to continue, and that a well-functioning society of any sort will be somewhat skeptical of outsiders. This does not mean pogroms are ok, but a little light shit-talk is nothing to soil one's trousers over.

Racism is a magical word that literally has no meaning in 2023. First of all, there is no agreed upon definition of it and this would be the case even if it wasn't abused by left wing activists. But it is abused by left wing activists and it means anything that has racial implications or even just the appearance of them that the left doesn't like. There are a bunch of others like woke, antisemitic, socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, far-right, postmodern, critical race theory, Nazi, etc. and I could go on. These things had meanings at one point, but now they just mean my in-group or ideology thinks this person or thing sucks and we're going to call it one of these magic words so you know it's bad.

That's not true, racism has a very clear definition.

A collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas

If it quacks like an animal-that-quacks, then obviously it is an animal-that-quacks.

Who defines what a racist policy is and what racial inequality is though? There is a lot of subjectivity in there.

/u/PierreMenard is sarcastically quoting Ibram X Kendi's famously circular and incoherent definition of racism.

By your definition of racism, saying "I hate niggers" is not racist.

EDIT: I'm stupid and did not realise I was replying to sarcasm.

sarcastic quoting of kendi.

Agreed on most of these, but I think the terms "woke" and "capitalism" have retained fairly clear definitions even when used by their detractors.

I disagree. I've seen so many different things be called woke and I haven't seen anyone give it a good definition. I think my definition of it being the inverse of historical American values is a pretty good heuristic though. You take whatever Americans traditionally thought before the 1960's (or what wokes think they thought) and invert that and you get the woke position pretty reliably. For example, Manifest Destiny -> Stolen Land or We're a Christian Nation -> Christianity is oppressive or capitalism is good -> capitalism is bad.

For capitalism, I see leftists and socialists blame everything on capitalism. So you get stuff like the problem with X is actually capitalism for literally everything. So crime or inequality are apparently caused by capitalism even though they existed before capitalism.

Are the Proud Boys woke? No. Is BLM woke? Yes. Are the Proud Boys racist? Arguably yes. Is BLM racist? Arguably yes.

I can think of a few other things that are woke or not. I'm having trouble thinking of anything that is clearly and inarguably not racist.

So crime or inequality are apparently caused by capitalism even though they existed before capitalism.

Just to note, the same outcome can have different causes under different circumstances.

EG flooding can be caused by torrential rain or by tsunami, but it wouldn't be wrong for someone in a torrential rainstorm to say that the rain is causing the flooding they are currently experiencing.

For capitalism, I see leftists and socialists blame everything on capitalism.

If you lived in North Korea or the USSR why would "Communism" or The Party and the society it created not touch nearly everything politically wrong? Capitalism is responsible for the life we live. If it's not the best of all possible worlds, a society of angels, then yes some level of blame should be left at its feet.

This is especially true for the Marxist and therefore often socialist conception of Capitalism and society. Where everything flows downstream of economics as a first mover, including things like religion, romance, and local custom.

I disagree pretty strongly, 'woke' is applied by someone to almost everything non-conservatives do or say these days, and 'capitalism' can mean anything from 'any form of trade or private property' to 'a system with a specific ruling class of capital-owners that is distinct and privileged from workers'.

I do expect that you may personally have extremely clear definitions of those terms in your head, and be in a filter bubble where most people use the words that way pretty consistently.

However, I think this state of affairs is true for most of the people who use all those other terms, as well, and they have equally good reason to think their words are fairly clear and consistent.

I sort of disagree, I think they usually have a specific and constrained meaning to the people saying them.

The problem being that the people they're being said to are often hearing a different meaning, and the people they're being said about have a vested interest in making sure that they have no reasonable meaning at all.

So conversations break down into people talking past each other, either accidentally through divergence of perspectives and filter bubbles between people on the same 'side', or through intentional malicious misinterpretation (either immediate, or mediated through 'elites' pushing the narrative of confusing definitions) between people on opposite 'sides'.

It's true that, if you listen to 5 different people using these terms, they might be using them to talk about subtly or not-so-subtly different concepts, and they might not all apply the same term to the same situations. It's true that, on the macro scale, that makes it seem like they have no specific or coherent meaning.

But I think it's a thought-terminating error to jump from that appearance of incoherence on the macro level, to assuming that individual people who use them are not trying to say anything specific or meaningful or insightful or useful, and are just spouting random sneers.

Usually the individual does have something cogent they're thinking and trying to convey with the term, even if the state of the culture war makes it hard to convey these types of ideas effectively. You'll fail to learn something if you look at this difficulty and place the error in the mind of the speaker, rather than the sorry state of the language and culture.

Ideally, this is where we start asking each other to taboo our words, to make communication more clear.

The case for why, even if racism is good in principle, it's still bad: racism (proper racism) seems to lead, say, right-wing right people to despising intelligent Indians or Arabs or Africans for a long series of bizzare and contrived reasons. Smart people will have a lot more animus against smart Indians to them than randomly chosen white people, even when said smart indians have much more in common intellectually, politically, or whatever with them. "Race" clearly isn't a good boundary to determine things off of if you're already farther into the tails of some distribution than race differences describe.

Yeah. Cultural bias is probably a human universal. You can have (say) black and white living in perfect harmony and ganging up on those other group of bastards over there. "I don't give a fuck what color his skin is, he's not one of those X's from over the hill!"

Racism is an overloaded term, and thus impossible to discuss without first clearing a whole lot of semantic debris.

I'd be doubtful of racist statements like "This race is objectively inferior to that race". I'd be doubly doubtful of racist statements like "and that's why we need to do X to them in their own countries", unless backed by mountains of evidence and very strong arguments.

I'm neutral on racist statements like "race X seems to display trait A" or "race X disproportionately behaves in manner B" or "countries of race X tend to develop in way C", so long as some evidence can be summoned.

I'll happily endorse racist statements like "people of race X are overwhelmingly likely to be recent arrivals in my country" and "race is an excellent proxy for culture" up to the racist statement "and that's why we should severely restrict immigration" or the similarly racist "I prefer to interact with people of my own race".

And finally it seems to me that what many terminally online or very leftist people mean by "racist" is "whatever white/european/biodeutsche people do".


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