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Notes -
Last year I made a prediction about 2023 marking some sort of turning point regarding the Trans issues. But how does one judge the accuracy of a prediction that boils down to "the vibes are shifting"? To attempt that, let me explain where I was coming from when I made it.
My first exposure to trans issues was on weird rat-adjecant Internet forums, Somewhere between 10-15 years ago. Either a trans person would join the forum and bring the subject up, or, interestingly, a cis regular would bring it up, and a trans-poster would appear, seemingly out of nowhere (and in retrospect it's somewhat scary how often it turned out to be Zinnia Jones, speicifically). They spoke with confidence, they knew the Science (and in those places we respected the Science), and could dispatch any argument coming their way like pros. Through it all I had many doubts - is it really wise to let minors make that decision? How exactly can puberty blockers be reversible? How do you even diagnose dysphoria? But that was just my stomach grumbling, and they had the Science, they seemed ubeatable.
Fast forward a few years, and a whole bunch of things have happened. The replication crisis cast doubt on the Science writ large, and critical look at some of the foundational research in Trans-Science turned up massive issues in that specific branch, detransitioners started showing up, massive shifts in the demographics of transitioners started making it's way to official statistics, not to mention an exponential increase in the raw amount as well. Instead of confidence, I started seeing trans activists genuinely flustered, not dumbfounded, but clearly things were happening that they weren't expecting, and didn't know what to make of yet. For my part I still felt uncertain, maybe some new information is going to come up that will contradict what flustered them? Maybe they'll dig out some detail the critics overlooked? Maybe they'll come up with a really good argument to address the issues raised? By the end of 2022 I felt like clicked through the dialogue tree several times over, with several different people, over a long enough period of time - if they could come up with something, they would already.
So what would a vibe shift look like?
Around that time I saw the documentary The Minds Of Men (it's quite rambly, very conspiracy-theory-y, but if those aren't deal breakers, and you have 3.5 hours to kill, it's well argued, and I recommend it), it is about MK-Ultra and psychosurgery, and it is in fact what inspired me to get that copy of Time Magazine as well as a bunch of historical documents I could dig out online. One recurring question I had when watching the documentary was “how the hell did I not hear about tthis”? It's not like I'm an expert, but this is the sort of stuff that felt like it should pop up along the way in my areas of interest. I heard about the Rosenhan experiment, I heard about the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram experiment, even the 30-50's era lobotomies, why not the late 60's to early 70's era of psychosurgery? Was it just not a big deal? Well, it was big enough to be covered in Time, it was big enough for a best-selling thriller based on the premise, and it's movie adaptation (I wasn't sure when I wrote the post originally, but the Terminal Man is indeed based on the case of Leonard Kille, sometimes referred to as Thomas R. by the media, who was treated in the clinic that was covered in that Time article), the documentary featured footage I also recall from edgy 90's grunge MTV videos, hell my mother remembered hearing about it at the time, through the Iron Curtain, no less!
So assuming psychosurgery was indeed a decently-sized issue, could it just disappear into the mists of history? I asked that very question and the consensus response seems to have been “yes, definitely!”. Your theory on that may differ from mine, but I ended coming to the conclusion that memory of such events needs to be actively maintained or it will fade. We remember things that are useful for people writing history books (or the ones who employ them) and forget the others, so while a similarly sized scandal like the Tuskagee experiment has a certain “Never Again” quality to it, others, like psychosurgery will fall by the wayside. And before you bring it up - no, this is not due to the affected demographics, which are largely the same. If you read the Time magazine article, you'll see doctors Sweet, Mark, and Ervin were planning to deploy psychosurgery as a cure against the race riots of the 60's.
Some might notice that the hypothetical I linked to in the recent paragraph is specifically about trans issues. Indeed, all these thoughts were bubbling in my head for over a year now, and I pretty much expect the hypothetical to become reality. What does a vibe shift look like? That. Was the prediction accurate? Well, I was avoiding specifics because I don't know how to even begin to pin those down, but looking at the state of the discourse on this forum, the pro-trans side seems to have officially moved from “that did not happen” to “and if it did, that's not a big deal” regarding medical interventions on minors. But it is perhaps the reactions of relative outsiders to the debate that are more indicative of the vibe shift and it:s mechanics:
If we were to see a vibe-shift-fueled memory-holing of the issue, would it not happen through People of Status suddenly finding the subject “tacky”, and “played out”?
Now I'm not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, timing is exactly the thing that's going to be hard to get right in a prediction like this. It also might feel silly to make sweeping societal predictions off of changes in internet discourse, but who ended up being right, people freaking out about the changes in Internet discourse seen in Tumblr Social Justice Warriors, or people claiming it was just a couple crazy kids on the Internet?
I think the only thing you're seeing is that those formerly pushing it are playing it down until the US elections are over. It worked to stop the backlash which was happening, even at ground zero in the US (the Loudon County School Board). It'll be back once they've won in November.
I don't think this is something that will be changed through electoral politics. I suppose bans on transing minors are part of the spat, but it won't end through a legal ban. It's been pointed out that a lot of the this is driven by social contagion. The psychological mechanism behind deciding to transition is probably a lot more complex than a mere grift, but for a while it was patently obvious that transitioning is a quick way to get positive attention (and in some cases money). Unless they manage turn it into a literal religion, with trans people constantly built up and maintained as some kind of sacred caste, at some point people will just get bored, and move on to the next thing. When that happens it's over.
It will be interesting to see what happens if the only option remaining to get positive attention for people who transitioned, will be to loudly complain about being misled. That's probably enough to set off a domino of it's own, which is why there's such a strong cordon sanitaire around detransitioners among progressives. I'm with @OracleOutlook, probably they'll find a way to turn it around and blame it on conservative gender norms, or something.
I think this is a really bad model of what motivates a lot of transitioners, especially younger ones. You're a lot more likely to see stuff redirect into enby or dissolve-the-gender-binary, in the unlikely case 'classical' gender transition gets depopularized. Far too much of modern culture is built around telling everyone to hate masculinity and women to fear their vulnerability in their femininity.
((That said, I recognize I'm a lot more sympathetic to trans stuff than the average person.))
Maybe, but enbyizm will only get you so far. You might get gimmicks like enby bathrooms in progressive spaces, but the trans issue crosses too many boundaries that people won't back down from. Enbies won't give you males in women prisons, sports, etc.,or Trans Women Are Women.
Some people pointed out that the whole trans thing is just a subculture like Goth, except it also involves permanent body modifications. Non-medicalized enbyizm will be literally just another subculture.
A lot of enbys medicalize to a extent I expect you or the median social conservative would not be comfortable with, and have for longer than enby has been well-recognized as a term. Literally today in my tumblr feed discourse for a ratsphere example. And while it would be a 'retreat' on some matters to some extent, I'm not sure it's as big a retreat as you'd think.
There's a tendency to round the more obnoxious nonbinary people into more standardized trans categories (including legal and statistical measures!), and to round the less obnoxious trans people into the nonbinary category, but there's a lot going on in those communities that isn't obvious to outside observers.
Well, I agree this would turn a victory into a hollow one, but I don't see that particular scenario working out. I think it's more likely I'm straightforwardly wrong, and the trans movement wins. "We were wrong about transing kids into men/women, but now we know better! The Science clearly shows we should have been turning them into Nullos instead!" feels way too out there.
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The social contagioning tiktokers are, granted, not social conservatives, and when they vote they almost assuredly vote democrat, but they don't seem to be backed by democrats(you can usually tell when influencers have backing from the DNC. These guys aren't running get out the vote drives, after all). It's more like some influencers coming up with this stuff on their lonesome and then a bunch of abortion doctors offered them medical assistance for reasons, and this didn't really become associated with mainstream progressive politics until after it blew up.
So yes, I agree with you; the endpoint won't be political, and this stuff isn't driven by politics, it's driven by something else(I think declining mental health among liberal adolescents+fallout from the sexual revolution cannibalizing itself).
Yeah, I dont think this is literally sponsored by the DNC, but "all on their lonesome" sounds way too innocent to me. Granted, this is when I crack out the tinfoil, and start drawing charts explaining the structure of global conspiracies.
I agree that "all on their lonesome" sounds a bit innocent, but I really don't think mainstream progressive establishment types were backing this all along. My tinfoil hat tells me that the poster children wouldn't be mentally ill if they were(sure, liberal adolescent mental health is bad, but it's not that bad).
My best guess is that some progressive NGO got a grant for "helping gender minorities raise awareness through new media" or something, and so coached a trans-type on social media to exploit the algorithm before spending the rest on a conference in the bahamas, then it just became a fad.
I would blame the progressives for having standards which enable it. If you say no gatekeeping, if you try your best to keep parents out of the process, if you go out of your way to laud how trans people are brave strugglers against the outside world, if you make sure that anyone speaks up against the trans gets fired from their job, you're going to get a lot of social contagion trans, regardless of whether you're backing them explicitly.
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But that's kind of the central issue here. Trans people are sacred insofar as Progressives are concerned, as they seek to prohibit speaking the blasphemies (as every other religious society tries to ban saying "God and the saints aren't real", and perhaps more relevantly here, debating the scientific merit of, uh, trans-substantiation).
Thing is, we already have a word to describe people who have their sex organ(s) removed (either they made it that way themselves, or were made that way by others), and everything beyond that (including the refusal to acknowledge that they're the same thing) is just tribal politics. It's taxonomically accurate for those who have the surgeries and the people in eunuch-advocacy organizations are obviously well aware of this- I doubt any given late-antiquity person would draw a distinction between eunuchs in their time and ours (aside from the fact that the "man" part of "castrated man" now refers to women as well) and so I don't either.
I think Progressivism as it is right now has too much "angry women trying to stick it to men" to survive a future where that is no longer a viable political strategy, and LGBT are neutral-at-worst to that goal (since, with respect to men, G is not interested in women by definition, B is not meaningfully distinguishable from G, and T are not only intensely effeminate but also infertile... hence not a threat either).
[Come to think of it, there might be something to say in here about "why so many effeminate men today" in the sense that effeminacy is a strategy to pull resources from elders being way more relatively powerful than that generation usually is for the same reason/along the same biological pathways it works for women in general, but that's out of scope for now.]
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To push back on this a little bit; Trans activists can't stop themselves from leeroy jenkinsing away and the progressive-activist industrial complex hasn't previously demonstrated much ability to rein in their loonier fringes going leeroy jenkins.
It's just a question of coverage. Black Hebrew Israelites Leroy Jenkins every day, and are ignored.
BHI’s have some connection to the progressives, but they’re technically condemned as
hereticsa hate group, so ignoring them when they get themselves in trouble by going off the reservation(were never there) is easy. Trans activists, no such luck.Black Power groups are inherently part of the progressive grouping, that BHI manage to get thrown out of the grouping is itself remarkable. Black Power : Black Hebrew Israelites :: Gay Rights : Trans Rights?
I mean there really isn’t a shortage of black power groups that the ADL/SPLC/etc call hate groups and no one(in the progressive mainstream or the broader establishment more generally) challenges this. I haven’t done deep dives on what these groups believe but I’m given to understand that many of them, once you get past the schizoposting about Yakub or Jewish west Africans, are just the black version of fundamentalist Christianity in terms of practice.
You can look up lists of hate groups on mainstream progressive groups’ websites- I know at least the SPLC has an entire category dedicated to black power
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And the one time their antics actually got in the news, it was somehow reported as "racist smirking MAGA kid is racist to elderly native man".
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My apologies if this is something you've addressed in the past elsewhere, but I think an important preliminary question is what one thinks the underlying phenomenon of Trans is. Not so much the question of biological vs mental vs cultural vs spiritual, that can fall within any category, but the question of are there real people who are really trans and should transition. The way I see it, with variations, we can point to three broad theories/explanations:
The mainstream Pro-Trans TRA view: All, or at least a morally-significant vast majority, of people who claim to be trans are trans in some significant way where the best thing they can do is transition socially and medically. No, or at least a morally insignificant minority, of people who declare themselves trans are not actually trans and will be harmed by transitioning. The correct number of trans people to exist is as many as state they are trans, probably higher than currently exist in our still "trans-phobic" society.
The standard anti-trans social contagion view: Trans people do not exist. No one is trans. At best people who think that they are trans have been infected by some form of social contagion which acted on another variety of mental illness, and they will not be happier as a result of transitioning. At worst, people who state that they are trans are exploiting society and its kid-glove treatment of trans people. The correct number of trans people is zero.
The blended, anti-absolutist, mushy-middle, false-compromise, empirical but unprincipled view (which I hold): Some hard-core of people exist who, for whatever reason, will always want to transition to living as the opposite sex and will be happier if they do so; but there also exist today people who transition for reasons of social contagion or to take advantage of policies, who would be happier living as their birth-sex. The correct number of trans people is probably much smaller than the number among young people today, but it is not zero.
The vibe shift will look different depending what people think is the underlying reality. Let's Stop Talking About it So Much is a shift away from 1), but it might be a shift towards 2) or a shift toward 3); it is optimal policy for 3) while 2) would seem to require a more militant anti-trans view, a crusade to remove it from history books. Lobotomies and Electroshock Therapy went through significant pop-culture crusades against them before they were forgotten. While today we mostly forget these controversies altogether, they never really existed for us, they were first demonized aggressively and publicly.
I personally hold view 3), and more or less always have. Empirically, I've met and known and interacted with people who call themselves trans who are basically fine citizens, and state that they are happier as a result. I see no evidence strong enough to doubt them. I also have met and known people who I don't think are actually trans, despite announcing so, and I'm certainly aware of the evidence of social contagion. I don't think making transition illegal for adults is a good idea, or outlawing trans people otherwise, but I also think the attention paid to the issue is out of all proportion and probably leads to the social contagion problem. Vocally supporting or opposing trans stuff makes trans stuff interesting, teens want nothing more than they want to be interesting. Overly villainizing something gives it power. It all strikes me as increasingly uninteresting.
Now there is a strong argument that 3) is a halfway house, a wishy washy morally cowardly position. I'm not sure I have much of a philosophical counter to it.
Overall, I hope you're correct.
I found this Tumblr screencap a while back, it stuck in my head, and then it turned up again recently:
For me, that's a useful way to view matters. Is a given person a gender enjoyer? Or someone who isn't enjoying anything?
I honestly have no idea what meaning I'm supposed to be drawing from that story.
I am not surprised that the author fancied themselves mischievous and fun to be around after that exchange. Certainly no longer a "failed male" as I expect many transwomen often slotted themselves as.
I know I would have found the conversation delicious, were I on the recieving end of it.
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If I ever addressed it, it's scattered across different posts. I don't think 3) is a wishy-washy halfway house, I think it's a perfectly respectable position, and would be happy if this ends up being the new compromise. I also don't think it's a good idea to make decisions for adults, but I don't think this is what the controversy is about, nor do I think it's about the amount off attention paid to the issue. For me, it's two things:
I do have to admit I started leaning a bit towards 2), since I heard that anorexia essentially didn't exist, until one case was documented, covered by the media, and suddenly the whole thing became endemic. I started thinking that some people are just Not Well, and gravitate towards these self-harming behaviors, for reasons which might by unknown even to them. What to do about it is anyone's guess, the answer will depend on one's values rather than any evidence, and I heard compelling arguments for and against either approach.
But psychosurgery did not. It was a separate episode from lobotomies, and it really does look like a case of Culture War that went down the memory hole.
The idea that trans issues gained power on the back of being villanized strikes me as extremely ahistorical. I also don't see how pretending it's not there will take away it's power stemming from it being taught as fact at the local school.
A huge portion of blue tribe culture is oppositional to red tribe culture, and vice versa.
For comparison, a local middle school student started a "Satan Club," people got upset about it. Local evangelical churches held prayer meetings about it. I was pulling my hair out at the sheer obtuse stupidity of publicly announcing how much the annoying middle schoolers who set out to annoy you had annoyed you. Ignored, the Satan Club was lame, the lamest most annoying goth neckbeards at your local school. Opposed, they were hilarious and awesome. Watching church moms get their panties in a twist about it, against myself I was kinda impressed. When people are that easily trolled, how can you blame people for trolling them?
Right, but I maintain this is not what happened with trans issues. With your scenario the proper comparison would be the school itself implementing a curriculum teaching the kids Satan is our lord and savior, it's not something that can be won over by ignoring it.
Similarly when you ssend your kid to a psychologist, because they're having issues, and before you know it, the kid comes back with a prescription for blockers or hormones, that's not a problem you'll solve by pretending it's it's not there.
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I personally find it sensible.
But, I recall rejecting the gender binary was a fad among some online progressives. I've never seen a good contrarian following through with the obvious response to online trans people. "Trans women aren't women. No one is. There aren't two and only two categories. Gender is a spectrum not meaningfully described by this arbitrary binary. So no, a guy on estrogen is not a woman. People born with 2 X chromosomes aren't, so you transwomen also aren't."
Cool. Wouldn't it be great if people were free to embrace and reject philosophical views depending on which ones they find plausible, rather than being pressured to embrace them through social ostracism, threat of losing your job, and hate speech laws?
I'm not sure what's that suppose to achieve. Sure no one is a woman in the same way that chairs aren't really chairs, horses aren't really horses, and tulips aren't really tulips. Every category can be deconstructed until it ceases to exist, but none of that changes the material reality around us.
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If being correct is "a wishy washy morally cowardly position" because extremists hate your nuance, then be a "wishy washy coward" confidently and boldly.
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I’m in house three as well. Although I think it actually is a bit more toward the anti-T side than anything. There is evidence of rapid-onset-dysphoria occurring, often in teens and preteens. The trick, I think is making the topic as boring and uninteresting and unnoticed as possible. Stop putting flags everywhere, stop holding parades, stop the school interventions, and 90% of ROD disappears leaving behind the truly trans community who need support. I d personally also restrict medical intervention unlit the person reached 16 or 18 (16 with permission). It seems like once you do all that, it’s a self solving problem. Only people who have the condition will persist through puberty and get medical intervention.
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Well, I agree with the "yes, definitely!" crowd.
Ten Thousand seems to me a far more plausible explanation of your previous ignorance than any attempt at intentional memory-holing.
The kinds of psychosurgery you're concerned about, namely in the 60s and 70s, was the period of terminal decline of the practise as more targeted therapies such as radio-ablation were developed, as well as better drugs. There's not even much in the way of a meaningful distinction to be made between "lobotomies" and "psychosurgery" as you see it, lobotomies are an example of the latter, and when they went out of fashion, so did the rest of it.
Back when I bothered to visit the default subs, in the usual subs like TIL and the like, I certainly saw plenty of discussion of the overall practise of psychosurgery, since lobotomies count. Primarily addressing the most photogenic example, Rosemary Kennedy.
Here's an example from last year:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/xa6wnc/what_they_did_to_jfks_mentally_ill_sister/
There's no "memory-holing" when there's hardly any memory to be holed in the first place.
And they didn't get to do it, did they? As far as I can tell, the only people Mark and Ervin subjected to amygdalotomies were a handful of aggressive patients with temporal lobe epilepsy.
I'd like to see any evidence that they had the power to "deploy psychosurgery" against the rioters before I particularly care what they idly dreamed about, or submitted suggestions for that were never implemented.
Hell, after reading through the primary source in your link from a year ago, I see no mention of any proposal by either of them to:
Here's a screenshot of the relevant paragraph, and it absolutely does not say what you claim it says:
https://ibb.co/Rvvbk45
They were a research team that were considered, according to the reporter, to be high quality correspondents with the Commission on Violence established by the President of the time. They had no higher authority, they were not part of the group studying "racial violence", and the article specifically mentions that they were more concerned with studying individual causes of violence and their neuro-physical origins, which is about the same kind of venomous accusation one can level against the odd researcher today who tries and fails to demonstrate that videogames/rap/movies cause violence.
The targets of amygdalatomy were a very distinct demographic from the more laissez-faire approach from when frontal lobotomies were in vogue. In fact, they're still done today, or at least of 2007:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17228178/
Nobody cares about the rare examples done in the 60s or 70s for the same reason nobody particularly cares about them today.
I don't see how.
Granted this is a bit of a clash of fundamental worldviews. I too used to believe that the world was a giant chaotic Brownian motion mess of stuff happening, the media reporting on it in a way that follows their self-interest ("they do it for the clicks!") and historians dutifully reporting on the more notable cases. The problem is that various recent events have completely discredited that theory in my eyes. We know for a fact the media do not report on things that are too embarrassing to the establishment, even if they could make a ton of money this way, and historians pick and chose what is "notable" to their hearts content.
Me not hearing about isn't even the full extent of the issue. The dearth of information about it once you do go looking for it is another part. Like I mentioned, the Tuskagee experiment, which was also a pretty small incident in the grand scheme of things, gets a massive Wikipedia page with scores of citations, god knows how many books written about it, etc. Psychosurgery gets a throwaway paragraph with dead links.
Yes, yes, I am well aware of the of the framework that considers "structural" just-so stories to have a greater explanatory value than ideas gaining and losing credence, or one side losing a power struggle to another. The problem is that framework rarely, if ever, bothers to actually argue for it's superiority. If you want to show that the Culture War that happened to coincide with the "terminal decline" could not plausibly cause it in any way, I'll need stronger evidence than that.
It's interesting that you say that, because I largely drew the distinction out of charitability for the other side. The anti-psychosurgery activists at the time were actually branding it as "lobotomies" at the time, and their critics claimed this was dishonest, that it's just a rhetorical tactic to equate a modern medical procedure with something far more crude.
No, thank god. This seems to be mostly due to the pushback of people organizing against them.
That's certainly what they claimed, but the problem is that in at least one case (which happens to be their flagship "success story") they were not above lying. The only incident of Leonard Kille being aggressive that was found, was him throwing a can at a wall, when he got into an argument with his wife, about her cheating on him. I can't remember if he suffered from any type of epilepsy, but I'm leaning "no". In any case, the guy was a successful engineer with 6 patents to his name, and they turned him into a vegetable. They also lied about the outcome of the "frenzied girl" from the Time article, claiming she was cured of her violent impulses, and joined the church choir, when she was unable to take care of herself, and institutionalized at the time when they were writing the book where they made their claims.
Another issue is that at least one of these doctors was performing surgeries on children, about the age of 10. Now, maybe these were some violent little shits, but going for brain surgery to cure a kid's behavioral problems sounds pretty batty to me.
Now, maybe everyone else they operated on was a violent epileptic, and a danger to themselves and others, but I'll be the one needing evidence on this one.
Well then I don't know if I particularly care about you particularly caring. Obviously they were doctors, not legislators or executives of the US government. That doesn't mean they weren't politically connected.
I have no idea why you think this contradicts anything I said.
Like I said "higher authority" is a red herring. "Racial violence" should not be in quotes since it's not a term I used in my post, nor did I say they were part of a group studying it. They did explicitly argue that abnormalities in the brain are an overlooked factor driving the violent behavior during the race riots, I don't know how you can deny that. Whether they saw that as an individual-level problem or a group-level problem is neither here nor there, maybe they were honest scientists being careful about how far they will go with their claims, maybe it was a fig-leaf to cover up what they really wanted to do (I think at the end of the whole affair, when they were planning to ramp up their operations, they wanted to open more centers explicitly targeting minorities, but it blew up in their faces), or maybe they were just using a Current Thing as a marketing tool to get grants. In the end it doesn't matter, because my point is that while we live in an era where every historical wrong against black people is dug out, and every type of "disparate impact" is considered a wrong, social justice activists seem oddly quiet on this one.
That abstract seems entirely consistent with the amount of psychosurgeries dramatically dropping as a result of the controversy we're discussing, so my point is that it's weird that the controversy itself is allowed to be forgotten (and that this is likely deliberate).
What's with the "I too"? You're sorely mistaken if you think I'm a quokka who is happy to take everything at face value. I'm merely positing that you are being excessively suspicious of an entirely benign fact, or at least an unremarkable footnote in history.
I have no idea who Leonard Khile is, and what he has to do with anything, and a Google search turns up literally zero results.
Do me a favor and spell out how exactly you can claim:
As for-
The quotes are a literal quote from the article you previously shared. I am pointing out that they had no involvement with anything beyond being practitioners of psychosurgery, who a reporter thought might be offering advice in the future to a Presidential Commission. No evidence of whether they did so, or what they might have said, and fuck all in terms of any effect.
They did not make that specific claim. The closest thing they claimed was that they had found a correlation between violence in general and brain abnormalities. That is a far more general and unobjectionable proposal.
Knowing the average scientist, far more likely to be the latter, and I invite you to demonstrate any evidence of more nefarious intent. What makes you think they were planning to "open more centers explicitly targeting minorities?" Citation?
They are not "oddly quiet" about a tiny group of doctors who have never been demonstrated to have used their niche neurosurgical techniques for malign ends. They are precisely the expected level of quiet.
Hardly. I can assure you that neurosurgery as a field is doing fine, and psychosurgery, in the particular sense where you're trying to solve behavioral issues, still exists.
It's niche, and has been for half a century, but mostly because we have less invasive therapies and non-surgical ways of affecting targeted parts of the brain. The "controversy" ceased to be a meaningful factor in the 50s and onwards, it's worthless today. There are plenty of rare, but well-established surgeries that are done maybe a dozen times a year in superspeciality hospitals where the last research paper of note was decades back. That does not make them discredited or controversial, that shows that they're niche and mundane. Stereotactic amygdalatomies are arguably obsolete, since targeted radio-frequency ablation does the same job and better.
If you want to eat nothingburgers and exist in an excess of paranoia, feel free to do so. The optimal amount of suspicion is not zero, but in your case, you have failed to make a convincing case why anyone should care. Certainly not showing it's been memory-holed in a suspicious manner.
"I too" was meant to express that I did, in fact, used to adhere to that framework too. I don't know if I would call it being a quokka, which I think requires naive innocence in the face of obvious hostile intent. If you want to see my objection expressed as a meme, I'd pick this one.
The issue with this framework is that it will tend to produce a massive status-quo bias. Anything not covered by history will be an unremarkable footnote because no one has covered it, while other small-scale incidents that are covered must have been remarkable, because they were covered.
Sorry, it's been a while since I looked into this, and I misremembered how you spell his name. It's Kille, not Khile, but Thomas R. does yield results. Like I said, he was the flagship success story trotted out by Ervin, Mark, and Sweet, only for it to turn out they were outright lying about the state they left him in, or him being aggressive which supposedly justified the treatment.
They have made direct attempts to convince the American government that their surgeries could alleviate social problems like the riots, and violence more generally. They were successful enough at that, that they secured financial backing to open the Boston clinic, and then again later to expand their project to the "center for the study and reduction of violence" in California, and it would likely result violent criminals being subjected to psychosurgery, were it not for public backlash that happened at the time.
Pardon. As often happens, this is what I get for skimming. Also I didn't re-read that article before the top level post, and also I got hit with the flu, so I'm thinking a bit slower. All excuses in the end.
There's a lot more to the story than that one article. This isn't some guys doing surgeries, and some reporter finding it interesting, this was an actual Culture-War scale controversy, with different sides battling out what is the right thing to do. I won't expect anyone to watch the documentary I linked (like I said it's long and rambly), but don't assume I'm basing everything on a single article.
They did not make that specific claim... in the article, but they did make it in a letter they sent to JAMA (see: Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence).
Well, I don't know if we should be going by what average scientists do. Some of these guys were positively glowing.
By 1972 they were looking to branch out. Doctor Sweet appeared before congress to ask for more funding, in order to establish more clinics across the country. One such project was the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the UCLA led by dr. West., which recruited two junior high-school to participate in the program - one in a majority black, and the other majority Chicano are.
As for nefarious intent, call me excessively suspicious, but requesting access to a military base for the Center, because it's "remote" and "secure", sounds pretty damn nefarious to me.
Video link for non-videophobes
Well, you're the doctor, and no offense to neurosurgeons (they actually seem to try to do it right, as far a I can tell), but I was under the impression that they absolute pussies compared to psychosurgeons. Don't they go on and on about how dangerous it is, and how it's a last resort?
Sure, it wasn't shut down completely, but you said yourself the time period in question was the point of it's decline. The paper you linked to seems to confirm it.
How do you think being memory-holed in a suspicious manner would look like, decades after the fact?
I appreciate the sources.
Addressing the letter to JAMA that you linked:
Emphasis added. The letter was written in the context of sweeping race riots, but I do not see anything suggesting racist/discriminatory intent on the part of the authors. They specialize in neurological correlates to violence, there's an epidemic of ongoing violence, and they're urging further research into the topic and treatment of those who have predilections to indulge in it.
The identification of violent/anti-social individuals is still a routine matter in psychiatry, though the matter only extends to formal diagnosis of Anti-social Personality Disorder, which doesn't have any treatment. Consider it a more formal way of saying, yeah, this dude's an asshole.
There's nothing singling out black people, or suggesting they're uniquely prone to violence, the race riots were simply the most salient example.
Regarding the other evidence you've shared, I don't consider it particularly damning. If you wish to study violence, especially the aetiology, then you want to conduct your research in an area with a high amount of violence. Would you deny that high schools with majority black/hispanic students wouldn't on average be more violent? That's a factually true statement. Fund raising before Congress to make the most of a (quite relevant) Current Thing? Who wouldn't?
On the use of a military base:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nike
The Army was handing out now useless Nike silos, which were snapped up by everyone from schools to airsoft players. This is because they were moving out, not offering a timeshare program!
This isn't some kind of top-secret blacksite for MKULTRA redux, there was property being handed out to whoever asked, and if I was to organize a program that involves isolating violent patients (likely against their will), then "remote" and "secure" sounds like excellent ideas, regardless of what I do with them.
I have met plenty of psycho surgeons, no psychosurgeons, so I have no opinion on their personality and habits. They don't market themselves as such anyway, they call themselves neurosurgeons.
Because it was obsolete, not because it was controversial (not by 2007, at the least). For a perfectly benign example, open cholecystectomies have long been replaced by laparoscopic cholecystectomies. They were never controversial. In the odd case where the destruction of a small portion of the brain is needed, we zap it with radiation, and that's a procedure that happens every day in my hospital, even if it's more for tumors than violence.
I find no conclusion to the case of Kille after looking, it seems the negative PR, especially after the association with Terminal Man came out, was sufficient to derail the psychosurgery division there. He was hardly the only patient, and others presented as case studies did much better. If you manage to find the outcome of the lawsuit, I'd be curious to see it.
I don't disagree with your description of their argument, but the problem is it doesn't matter. Taking another example, "redlining" is often brought up by progressives as an example of structural racism in America, even though it didn't explicitly target black people (in fact, that is perhaps the entire crux of the argument about "structural racism" to begin with). Being excluded from a mortgage sounds not quite as bad as being included into an involuntary brain surgery to me, so again a massive wikipedia page on one, and crickets on the other looks a little weird to me.
I mean... how many neurosurgery clinics said they can solve BLM if congress gives them a bit more money?
Checking the dates, it looked like they were asking for early access, before they were being handed out like candy. Either way the military still being there or leaving is not relevant to the argument, what caused the controversy stemmed from the center trying to setup camp somewhere where it couldn't be scrutinized by the public. And it was controversial, that letter did them in. It was leaked to the press, caused and uproar, and politicians withdrew the support / funding from the Center.
They did a bunch of other things that looked suspicious: they removed Ervin's name from later drafts of their project proposal, when too many people started asking "wait, isn't that that brain surgery guy from Boston?", and removed references to psychosurgery (which itself was being redefined to exclude placing electrodes, like what they did to Kille), and ended up renaming the Center to the "Project on Life-Threatening Behavior" to deemphasize the focus on violence (and thus contradicting the possible mundane reason for a remote and secure site you brought up).
All of this happened without the public even being aware of West's involvement with MKULTRA, which was declassified in the 2000's, I think.
That would be "The advances of psychopharmacology..." from the abstract you linked, what did they mean by "along with the existent skepticism of the medical community in regards to psychosurgery"?
I wanted to send a FOIA request to the Boston court where the case took place, but never got around to it. I'm not sure how you get started with that sort of thing.
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Sorry, I somehow missed you were just curious about the outcome. He lost the lawsuit, here's a contemporary NYT article about it. What I wanted to see is the juicy details, hence the FOIA.
Thanks for tracking that down!
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A lot of history fades from public awareness, even if people actively try to maintain it. This guy is a grifter, but in case that isn't damning enough, the difference between his summary and a more genuine one is serious, and that's despite a small industry of people like David Hardy spending years of their lives to both uncover and publicize the fine details.
'Psychosurgery' falls into a similar boat -- it's a fun trivia topic to reveal that a famous and popular-until-his-death President of the United States had a sister who was treated for 'depression' in a way that left her with the mental capacity of a two-year-old, so it's not forgotten. But in turn there's also just not that many survivors who were in that place where significant but not incapacitating harm could make them cause celebres, especially by the time you get to the 1960s amygdalotomies, where only thousands of the procedures have been done worldwide, rather than tens of thousands just in the United States.
Eh, that's a possible route -- the extent people suddenly stopped caring about where and how the Chinese government might have had any involvement in early COVID stuff is an overt case -- but it's not the only one. Contrast the treatments of masks, where an initial hard press against flipped in valence toward mandates (and still floats up and down in valence by time); or with common fashion cycles among 'progressive' media where a popular culture name goes from hero to villain and sticks well past their cultural relevance. And there's a possibility it just evolves.
I'm skeptical that any of these are going to happen. There's just too many trans people already around, in ways that are too hard to extract not just from doing trans stuff, but from being in social and environmental characteristics where .
But I'm a lot more sympathetic to the trans perspective than the median American, and significantly more so than the median poster here. Which brings the more immediate issue up:
In addition to the obvious issue you already recognize where posters on this forum and unrelated outsiders aren't great signs of what direction Discourse is going, and especially where People of Status are going, there's the more specific problem where even for our subculture this particular topic is hard to make fun to write about.
I try to spice up matters when I can, and there's part of me that hopes this is some place where there could be a reasonable meeting of the minds if we better understood what the hell we were talking about.
But mostly, that's not the sort of thing that happens, or even has signs of happening, and it's boring. The disagreements here are axiom-level, and while there's somethings that can change people's minds on the edges of pragmatic policies, maybe, it's not what the actual disagreements are. That's not a fault specific to the Motte -- the few trans activist spaces that allow disagreement on the margins or recognition of Red Tribe disagreement still don't actually have much to say -- but it's more frustrating here because there's many better options.
Is that not inherent? As you note, the disagreeements are axiomatic. I think that trans women are just delusional boys, and trans men are just confused and mentally ill (disproportionately actual teenagers)girls. Like you note we might be able to come to an agreement on, say, reducing pointless dickishness, or what level of discrimination is potentially tolerable(my answer would be a large but not infinite amount), or have some discussion of transgender sports or whatever. But it’s kind of boring to discuss our core disagreements because there’s no common ground; like literally there’s nothing to discuss. You may as well be saying 2+2=5 from my perspective(and Vice versa). ‘Yes it does/no it doesn’t’ is inherently boring.
That's one model, and it's definitely one that's correct in at least some circumstances. But it's not the only possible or relevant one.
Most people have different axioms and interests and preferences than you do, or I do, at some level. To go among others is to go among mad people. Yet most things don't devolve into a war of all against all. I'd like to wax poetic about recognizing the humanity in the other or recognizing the madness in oneself, but rather than that, or even some serious negotiated settlement, or some broader Westphalian Peace. It's not even that we don't care about these things, or that there are no weirdos that make the most trivial of these things their entire personality and want to restructure society, but it's possible to see them from the outside as something examined, and examined as a concept rather than as an enemy.
And that seems a lot more interesting for me, even if it's layered over axioms that can't be solved, even if a lot of the object-level discussions overlap.
I dunno. There are genuine pragmatic reasons that this particular issue is something people care about, and as much as I might personally want the libertarian perspective as a solution I can see why that would just make both mainstream views madder. Hell, even my "outsiders examining" goal is objectionable to a lot of people who find it dehumanizing. But I don't think it's inherent to every environment, even if it's inherent to many.
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I'm unclear what the distribution of opinions is around here. I get the broader strokes, but on some details I'm apparently confused.
I casually dismissed white nationalism recently and received more pushback against that than for any other opinion.
I don't think we are largely a cabal of rightoids. But maybe I'm confused on how large of a subfaction they are around here. We need an ideological consensus around here. I predict the Motte is more sympathetic to trans people than the median American, and by a large degree. But also vastly more critical of trans talking points than the median upstanding PMC progressive.
I didn't see exactly what happened in that case, but as someone who was occasionally part of pushback like that, my perspective is that it is simply because there's a lot of lazy thinking when it comes to criticism of the white nationalists. When you're talking in mainstream society you can just say "x is a white nationalist" and if true that's a devastating critique that destroys someone's reputation by itself, let alone the argument they're making. But that's not the case here - they can actually mount arguments without just instantly being obliterated from the discourse. This means that if you use the same lazy and poorly thought out attacks that get by just fine when the white nationalists have no ability to respond, you'll get destroyed when they can actually mount a defence at all. That's not to say that there aren't any white nationalists here, but I really don't think they're a majority at all.
I also don't think white nationalists are more than a small minority here. But I didn't expect significant pushback again rejecting their silly redefining of terms. One of them tried a lazy gotcha redefinition. I said "no". A number of them leapt to defend the lazy invalid gotcha redefinition.
The redefinition of otherwise sensible terms in question was: if you care about white people, then you necessarily must be a white nationalist. "Ethnostate or you don't care" was the completely invalid false dichotomy. Given that level of argument: they are the ones being obliterated by their wrong redefinition of terms. A single "no" is a complete argument against hostile fringe redefinition of common terms. That's indeed not what "care" means to almost everyone almost always. They can't trap me into saying I don't "care about white people" because I'm not a white supremacist. They don't get to define these words or make me answer to them.
But I have seen young American progressives and religious immigrant Muslims being completely unable to form a counterargument because they've never before been challenged. They think merely asserting their group's consensus is a knock down argument. "I understand you think that, but I don't agree" is beyond their experience or ability to deal with. So I get your larger point.
This sounds strange and unlike most interactions I see on these forums, are you able to find a link?
That’d be hammi in this train wreck of a thread. See also his response for some of the pushback he got.
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That's an interesting example, but I think it actually supports my point. The amount of resources required to keep something in public consciousness is substantial. Even when someone go to considerable lengths to maintain the memory of an incident, the establishment can effectively bury it with nothing more than a few cold shoulders.
I ended up being skeptical of these sort of explanations for societal trends. My problem is that I already seen too many big stories fabricated out of thin air, or hot scandalous ones that everyone got awfully quiet about. 60's Psychosurgery had at least one very sympathetic victim, who I think was instrumental in clamping the whole thing down, even when he ultimately lost his lawsuit, but his case seems to largely be forgotten.
At the end of the day I kind of agree, but not quite in the same way. Anorexics are a thing and probably will continue to be a thing, precisely there were too many anorexics already around, so in a way trans people aren't going anywhere. But given the utter state of the discourse, I don't think the current levels are sustainable. At least I don't think you'll get the same amount of trans people if it's no longer explicitly glamorized, if schools are not allowed to hide kids going trans from their parents, if doctors don't get to do "gender affirming care" by default, and threaten the family with suicide risk, if they object, etc.
For what it's worth, I appreciate your input whenever you speak on the subject. You're probably right that the disagreement is axiomatic, but I'm still curious about what axioms you're coming from, because admittedly the trans issue has always been a bit hard for me to grok. Are you coming from the transmed "body dysmorphia" approach? The "gender identity" one? Do you think transition is about relieving distress, or is it more a question of self-expression and people having the right to modify their body as they please?
That's probably true, but I'm not sure that looks much different to trans activists from the social conservative perspective just winning, and perhaps more critically I think you're still going to have a million+ trans or post-trans people going around, and unless they're sold against the concept, they're going to have alternative means for bringing matters forward socially. Whatever they do might still be such that the next generation of trans people is smaller, and maybe that loops back on itself, but you're looking at decades if not the better part of a century.
My relevant underlying axiom is that it is there must be limits to what governments can do to protect people from themselves, so probably closer to self-expression or right-to-modify, though the principle applies far broader than just body modification -- it's why I'm very skeptical of vape bans, soft drink size controls, or of the Australian arguments for gun control, with the extreme being matters like 'the FDA oppressed Stalking Cat'. Many of these things might be stupid things to do (especially for Stalking Cat and the vapers), but that's their choice to make.
This principal isn't unlimited, in the sense that we reasonably restrict selling cigarettes to children or advertising ethylene glycol as a low-calorie sweetener, and there are some edges cases with trans stuff. But even to the extent I can be persuaded on the edge cases that were parallels, it's hard to present a fair or honest engagement. Bringing up false-advertising-like claims inevitably invites discussion about what extent any given procedure or policy has benefits. I've even been persuaded on a few matters! While the data for damage from short-term use of puberty blockers on bone density isn't anywhere near as strong as trans skeptics think, early-initiated long-term use of those blockers probably has some harms for sexual development in adulthood for both continuing trans and desisters that is neither being disclosed nor documented properly, for example, and in ways I'd honestly expected to have been better hammered out and wasn't.
But short of convincing evidence that adult trans people are going to keel over by the cartloads with the equivalent of the asbestos-to-mesothelioma pipeline, though, any debate on this pretty quickly turns to "sucks to be them, gotta update that documentation" or "okay, guess we should wait mid-to-late teens". Which is going to seem like a really weird goalpost-moving to someone holding this position, rather than an update-on-evidence, in addition to just coming across ghoulish when someone's just finishing talking up how a victim is now horribly dysphoric/has had their entire romantic life upended/couldn't trust that bungee jumping service.
That said, I don't think my principles are common, here. Not only are the average trans activist likely motivated by something different, in many circumstances they're actively drive toward widespread government controls (not just on this topic, such as with bans on stupid talk-only conversion therapy, but also on a wide variety of others). But if principles only mattered when they helped people you agreed with, or agreed with them, they're not principles at all.
I think that dysphoria and gender identity are more useful frameworks for understanding what motivations trans groups, rather than what would change the minds or arguments of trans activists or the median person. Indeed, I don't think they are, or should be, particularly persuasive to other people even presuming that they were true: in addition to the self-hostage-taking that social conservatives often bring up, we pretty clearly don't recognize mass suicides of other groups as cause for actions along the beliefs of those groups. But they're neither what makes the policy for within the view of trans people, nor are they what would need to be different for their advocates and activists to change their minds rather than their arguments.
Thanks for the elaborate response, I feel a bit bad now since I don't seem to have too much to say about it. It does make me wonder why you think your view is so rare here, because I don't see much of anything that I'd disagree with here. There might be something around the validity of dysphoria - I'll be the first to confess I don't grok it at all, be it personally or in the abstract - but it doesn't seem to be the cornerstone for your views on the matter, nor is it for mine. I can understand (though it frustrates me) how people immediately jump to "do you want to ban adults from making medical decisions for themselves?" upon seeing my vehement disagreement with trans activists, but I don't think this is what the disagreement is about. Everything you said the limits of the government to protect people from themselves is, in my case, preaching to the choir.
This does seem to hit the nail on the head as to why we're in such a pickle. I don't even care about alternative means of bringing the matters forward socially, as long as they're not underhanded (using the public school system to sell the concept to kids, behind the parents' back being one extreme example). But if what I consider to be setting up some basic rules of engagement is already defined to be a lose condition by the pro-trans side, well... where can we go from there?
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People claiming it was just a couple of cray kids on the internet.
The thing is, you can certainly point to things that the social justice movement has changed about the world, and be mad about them if that's your perspective.
But those things were not the central claims of the anti-SJWs at the time. The central claims were things about Otherkin and 53 genders and Muslims taking over city and raping all the women and Christians being persecuted into the shadows and of course of course of course children being groomed and abused and etc. etc. etc.
You do the same thing here:
Again, the blood libel that absolutely did come up and that we were saying 'that never happens to' is 'Crazy mothers cutting of their 4-year-old's dick', and evidence is still that this never happens. The best you have is the one Reuters search of giant databases, which even assuming there are zero errors in that medical database with hundreds of millions of entries (which, just, NO, that's not true), lists '56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021'. Which, 1. 16 is the age of consent in most states, 16 and 17 year olds doing things is not the same claim as 'young kids are doing this thing', 2. that's just genital surgery of any kind, no data to indicate it's genital reconstruction surgery for purposes of medical transition, some people need genital surgery sometimes, 3. some people are born intersex or with other developmental abnormalities in the genitals, choosing how to resolve those at 17 isn't the central case for the trans debate at all, and 4. etc.
So, sure, maybe a few years ago, there were a few people saying 'I'm really worried that as many as eighteen 16-17 year olds per year might be getting genital reassignment surgeries, I wish they'd wait another year or two', and the correct reply to that would have been some measured response like 'Well the data is kind of ambiguous and I'm not sure it actually tells us that's happening at all, and since you're allowed to get married and have kids at that age I'm not sure it's hugely important to deny them this one life-altering decision while allowing so many others, and if the numbers are that small I'm not sure it makes sense to have the larger debate about the trans issue generally hinge so crucially on this tiny and ambiguous group of people, but sure, maybe a few people are making questionable decisions and should wait a year or two to be sure, maybe we send around a memo to doctors about that or something.'
But that measured take of 'I'm really worried that as many as eighteen 16-17 year olds per year might be getting genital reassignment surgeries, I wish they'd wait another year or two' is not something that I remember ever encountering from the loudest culture warriors on the other side, who I had to engage with if I wanted to have any public debate on this issue at all. The bailey was very much 'children are getting their genitals mutilated left and right,' to which I correctly said 'No, that's not happening.'
For both the trans issue and the SJW issue, there was probably a motte of people with limited nuanced predictions who were mostly correct, but the bailey where most of the rhetoric took place was very much wrong. This is not surprising or even unusually shameful, my side does it too, it's what pretty much always happens on every issue everywhere all the time. That's why it's such an important idea that their site is named after it.
What I do consider shameful is the perfect-hindsight/moving-the-goalposts tactic of bringing up vague memories of how people rejected your bailey in the past, and then going 'see, here is my perfectly reasonable motte, and remember how the other side rejected it back then? They sure have been proven wrong!'
This is part of why I don't try to keep score and issue recriminations (unless challenged, as here). I'm sure a lot of this is not intentional, that in hindsight you remember the argument being more about your motte, or that you personally did hold the motte in the past and interpreted people rejecting the bailey as rejecting you too. I'm sure I'd accidentally make mistakes like this one if I tried to keep score and issue recriminations. I just don't think it's worth it.
One problem with this is that laser-focusing on genital surgeries, and acting like their low amount is an argument against skeptics, is already shifting of the goal-posts by the pro-trans side. Surgeries (not just genital surgeries, surgeries generally) was deemed to be something so absurd that the idea was used as a progressive sneer against anyone raising concerns - "no one is performing surgeries on minors, chud". Well, turns out they are, so even taking the excessively charitable version of the trans movements' arguments still shows them moving the goalposts, but the excessively charitable version was not the argument they were actually using, that's just a retcon.
Their actual claim was that no one is doing irreversible medical procedures on minors. Taking the second most-charitable version of the pro-trans argument, and counting procedures they considered irreversible at the time of making the argument, you'd also have to consider mastectomies and hormones. Doing away with excessive charity altogether, and just taking the argument at face value, you'd also need to include puberty blockers, which were (and still are) sold as reversible, but aren't.
If you consider it shameful, why have you written a long-ass comment doing exactly that, all throughout it?
Your comment features exactly zero of keeping scores and issuing recriminations, which is a shame, because it would be a marked improvement. I can see how someone like @gattsuru could be characterized this way, and while some people find his habit of linking examples from the past annoying, I find it very helpful. But you are just patting yourself on the back for work you simply did not put in.
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Another example would be justifying the anti-vaxx/anti-lockdown baileys of "vaccines are going to kill millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of people within a few years"/"The WEF is going to keep the lockdowns and forced masking and vaxx mandates on forever and ever and ever to turn humans into slaves" by referring to the "Vaccines weren't nearly as good as advertised"/"lockdowns, masks and mandates were pretty useless considering how onerous and divisive they were" mottes being arguably fulfilled.
If that's another example, would you be willing to defend his portrayal of the trans discourse?
No, not really - the situation seems to concern the status of this discussion in the United States, and I'm frankly too unfamiliar with the actual situation there to comment at length.
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If compliance had been higher they very easily could have pressed the mandates to being a permanent fixture of life, certainly in europe and the non-american west.
It took a major rebellion to end mandates in canada
The mandates ended around the same time in all Western countries, no matter the level of compliance. A large contributing factor was probably Omicron and everyone getting the Covid anyway, with a contributing factor of Ukraine war wrenching the decision-making class attention immediately to another topic. However, even sans these, I don't believe the mandates would have stuck around; they were just another part of the endless process of trying to find the One Weird Trick to solve Covid, and they failed.
The convoy "rebellion" most likely lengthened the process in Canada, since it made it a question of authority for Trudeau and the rest of the political class.
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I was thinking of making another top level post on this, but to not spam the top with trans issues, I'll just leave a note here.
The issue with your portrayal isn't so much that it's accusing the other side of motte-and-bailey, as it's that it's portraying the motte as conceding the validity of the transgender care framework. The "reasonable motte" isn't "I wish they waited a few years to be sure", it's "there are serious questions about the scientific and ethical validity of both the theory and practice behind transgender healthcare", and the bailey was something to the effect of "this is all absolute pseudoscientific garbage". The issue that is coming up now is that the bailey looks more and more defensible.
I'm not particularly interested in debating the history of the discourse with you, but if you want to explicitly reject either the motte or they bailey now, that could be helpful in the future.
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Speaking of historical revisionism, I do sometimes wonder if pedophilia (NAMBLA) had more of a home in the 1950s-1990s gay rights movement than is shown in the history books.
Evidence:
Allen Ginsburg and a few others not being shunned.
Gay rights group ILGA disassociates with NAMBLA reluctantly only after pressure from the United Nations, with 12% voting that they would rather include NAMBLA even at the cost of their UN consultancy. (The vote was 214 to 30)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILGA_consultative_status_controversy
Helmut Kentler getting funding from the West German government.
Ultimately it's only a suspicion, and my confidence in the suspicion is below 40%. I haven't researched it much though, so I don't know.
Edit: and then of course there's France.
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Transgender medical procedures as the modern day lobotomy is, IMO, the correct framework. Low to negative evidence of efficacy. Violates the principles of prudence and caution. Makes no sense from a more grounded scientific POV. The only way Trans "science" is right, is if they navigate a series of very narrow channels, and they haven't demonstrated even one at this point. Its all bullying on that side of the ledger.
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Happy new year, all. More geopolitics that I don't understand:
Why doesn't the US or some other nuclear power Simply (tm) operate nuclear power plants at a profit on foreign soil on behalf of the local government? This would defuse narratives of the tech tree being made inaccessible to developing nations due to climate change campaigns. It would also promote nuclear non-proliferation and defuse narratives of preventing access to effective power technologies due to the risk of dual-use tech development. Finally, it would stabilize local power grids in regressing states and promote both stability, enabling eventual growth, and loyalty/dependency on the operator in the region. For the cost of single-digit billions of investment, the US (frex) infuses money into American industry, develops the region, and effectively infuses an extra quantum of stability and pseudo prosperity into regions that desperately need it, while extending and securing American hegemony and economic entertwinement/influence.
You're running on mistake theory. Nuclear power would already be useful against climate change even used at home, but the left doesn't support that because of anti-nuclear and anti-electricity ideology. How good the anti-nuclear arguments are is nearly irrelevant.
Conflict theory will tell you that saying "you're mistaken, nuclear power can be good" isn't going to work when fighting ideology.
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Isn't this is part of what SMRs are intended to do?
They will be constructed and disposed of in a 'safe' country and running them will be relatively simple and low risk so it can be done in more places.
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A couple of points- I'm not married to any of them, but I think all of them are at least worth considering. I definitely invite anyone who has further information/context/pushback on any of these to bring it.
Atoms for peace was a thing, once. Cold war era programs tend to get wound down even if they were actually kind of cool, but "a nuclear power provides enough assistance to running a nuclear power plant in your country that you can't use it to build a weapon" isn't unprecedented, and winding it down out of bureaucratic inertia is just bureaucratic inertia.
The environmental movement has a pretty big anti-nuclear wing. In my more optimistic moments I think this is because they're wildly misinformed; in my more cynical moments I think it's because they don't actually want a solution to carbon emissions, they want a continuing problem that gets money sent to their NGO's. In my really depressing moments I think it's because they have a solution in mind, and it's "everybody be poor", and that like lockdowners in 2020, they're not interested in discussing alternatives because they've settled on a solution and anyone who disagrees with them is axiomatically evil. I don't think there's a nice explanation for the anti-nuclear environmentalists and I also don't think they're Alex Jones villians who just hate whites or whatever; surely some are, but there's enough of them pushing electric cars and the like that I think they mostly are motivated by climate change and sinecures.
The environmental movement is bound up in progressive signalling. This is I guess a subset of 2, but it seems worth pulling out separately. Nuclear energy(and hydropower, and now that I think about it any workable solution) is a right-wing coded solution so a group that wants to signal progressive credentials will avoid it in favor of rambling about things that can't solve the problem.
The institutions dedicated to brainstorming solutions for climate change have a habit of not noticing the developing world. Like, that it exists. Yes, this habit is bad and they should feel bad for it. But we can't really change it; these institutions treat "now, what's your plan for the developing world" as "what about China" bad faith trolling. And that attitude just bleeds over; these people see their mission as making the US, CANZUK, EU carbon neutral by means x,y,z. They are very committed to both sides of that equation and nuclear power plants aren't part of it.
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I have a nuclear engineer in my distant family (and I cry every time I compare his salary to mine), so by the transitive property I am about 12.5% qualified to comment on this haha. (And I do try and keep up with nuclear power)
To an extent, the US does indirectly assist other countries in getting domestic nuclear power up and running. If you're a talented engineer from an allied or at least neutral country, you have every chance to study under the best in the States and then bring your knowhow back home, assuming you don't get hooked and settle down right there. You're then a prize for any competent government you hail from, that seeks to establish their own nuclear power plants. Of course, many countries, like Russia, China, India and so on, independently began their own power/weapon programs, because of some degree of hostility from the States (and the Soviets drank directly from the source).
I emphasize competent, most countries that strongly desire nuclear power have programs up and running, and many who would love to have nuclear power either lack state capacity or are untrustworthy/volatile.
If the US decided to operate nuclear plants in such nations, well, for one, the latter would be effectively ceding a great deal of sovereignty, I do not foresee the State Department being happy in the least to operate a plant that isn't secured by US forces, and with strict vetting and control over who works there. It would work closer to a military base rather than say, an embassy, and also prove to be a liability in case of the kind of volatility that many potential hosts suffer from.
Then there's also the usual slowdown or red tape from environmental lobbyists, which is bad enough for nuclear power in the States.
This is not to say that this isn't a good idea, it is, as far as I'm concerned. Sadly not every good idea gets pursued, and the US has enough trouble just keeping their own domestic nuclear from going under. Plus with how cheap renewables have gotten, you might as well just ship them solar panels and batteries, with much less in the way of domestic or international opposition, or the inconvenient considerations about what to do when a state falls to a coup, a revolution, or simply turns hostile.
I think the most elegant solution would be something along the lines of running a thick power cable from a nuclear-powered ship, along the lines of an aircraft carrier. You isolate yourself from a great deal of the troubles on land, and have the option to cut and run at a moment's notice if needed. Presumably existing aircraft carriers have other things to be doing, but the Navy are the experts when it comes to modular, reliable and most importantly portable nuclear power, and have been so for decades. China is currently exploring nuclear-powered cargo ships, likely both because it's a sensible idea in itself, and because they want to minimize reliance on oil in case Taiwan goes hot. Such a ship, with some modifications, would probably be a great design for nuclear power on tap.
Do the newer small reactor designs effectively discourage proliferation? I'm not familiar with the nuclear specifics, but it seems like the risk factor of your average tinpot dictator seizing the plants and using them to generate plutonium for weapons remains. I could see it working within friendly jurisdictions, though.
While this is true for electricity generation, especially in tropical latitudes, last I heard it isn't as practical as you might like for heating applications in colder climates. There isn't a storage technology today that can convert, say, Canada's long summer days into heating on its cold, long winter nights. And unfortunately most sources tend to mix "energy" and "electricity" breakdown in ways that make overall consumption numbers difficult to evaluate. Canada primarily heats houses with forced-air furnaces (combustion) and electric baseboard (which follows the grid's energy sources -- in winter -- which varies by province).
A complete elimination of fossil fuels probably requires a wholesale shift to electric (ideally heat pump) heating, which I only rarely see accounted for in energy discussions: it quite possibly changes grid energy usage patterns enough to require even more generation, and some substantive transmission changes.
New York has already banned new natural gas hookups in favor of everyone being stuck with barely-any-heat pumps. And they're shutting down generation, not building new; they tried to get New Jersey to generate for them (North Bergen Liberty Generating Station) but the NJ governor is opposed. (Personally as an NJ resident I'd say go ahead and build, and put a special tax on the power generated, the "green silliness tax")
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They do.
A lot of modern designs are made to be modular, operated sealed for years and refuelled only in factory. Breeding plutonium next to the reactor can be prevented by sealing access.
Power plants today have links and continual monitoring. No big deal with internet.
Proliferation isn't really the problem...
I'd be curious to read more if you have any sources to recommend. I'm less concerned for this particular point about proliferation while the plant is monitored and controlled from the West and more about a dictator that nationalizes it and is free to (ignoring workplace safety, as is dictatorial tradition) disassemble it and focus on a weapons program. But I'm not really an expert here, so perhaps that's not the concern, or we just exclude countries at risk of such things, although that hasn't been the most predictable in the past.
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From wikipedia: A hydraulic empire, also known as a hydraulic despotism, hydraulic society, hydraulic civilization, or water monopoly empire, is a social or government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy.[1]
Often associated with these terms and concepts is the notion of a water dynasty. This body is a political structure which is commonly characterized by a system of hierarchy and control often based on class or caste. Power, both over resources (food, water, energy) and a means of enforcement such as the military, is vital for the maintenance of control.
TLDR: You become vassal of the US if you literally want to have lights on.
As Europe has been learning for the past couple of years (aside from the French), this is true for natural gas as well- they had ample opportunity to learn back in '73 that American foreign policy own-goals/failures would affect them as well but chose not to for some reason.
Not at all. The thing is that for oil and gas because they can be stored switching supplies (in secret) is possible even if expensive. For electricity it is not. if you want to switch to different sphere of influence - you can't take over the powerplant before it gets made inoperable and any neighboring country that will be ramping up capacity to fill in the void can't hide it. So the state department can shut down in the worst possible for you moment.
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What prevents the client state from building sufficient capacity to not rely on the foreign plant? It's economically unfavorable while they can't get their shit together, sure, but that just means hard, not impossible or actively prevented. Or is your thought that the nuclear plant would be operated at a loss and price out other sources to cause dependency?
For what it’s worth, nuclear actually does tend to price very cheap per kWh. At least in markets which bid on capacity.
The cost to spin up a natural gas plant is relatively low. Coal is slower and thus more expensive. You don’t want to run one of those one day at a time; you want to keep it going overnight at lower capacity, even if that means selling the produced electricity for cheap. Then you spool back up for peak hours without having to pay startup costs again. Nuclear is much, much more extreme than this, and it also doesn’t need to stop very often. As a result, the nuclear plants in our market always bid a cheap floor so they’d be tapped to stay online. The only ones which bid lower were solar and hydro, since they would be producing whenever the sun/river was working.
This isn’t the same as operating at a loss, but it would have a chilling effect on building other plants. Same way that any other giant foreign investment could discourage a domestic competitor.
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No sane country wants to risk getting their national power grid shut down any time the state department is upset with them.
Plenty of countries, including the US, will export nuclear reactors: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/nuclear-reactors
Which countries are you expecting to be clients of this program?
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Suppose there's a coup and a new leader shows up who nationalizes the power plant. Historically it's within the rights of states to nationalize foreign-owned assets in their country. Take Suez or Iranian oil. Then this mildly untrustworthy turned very untrustworthy country has a nuclear plant, which is the goal you wanted to prevent. You can't get away from dual-use that easily. Plus you probably make a loss because nuclear plants are capital-intensive investments that pay off over decades. Furthermore no country would allow such an imposition on their sovereignty.
I think a more realistic reason is that the US is so incompetent and useless when it comes to nuclear power plant construction nobody would be interested - recent US nuclear plants have been amongst the most expensive in history. South Korea would do a better job but they're not interested in such a deal. They're eager to export their nuclear technology normally, as opposed to this weird way! Same with Russia, they just export to their friends:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Russia
What country are you thinking of, that would be suitable for this approach? Iran? The US hates them, plus they have their own nuclear industry, plus Israel would probably bomb it like they did in Syria. The US sent some light water reactors to North Korea back in the day under a deal that both sides later reneged on - then NK acquired nuclear weapons.
I'd imagined that the site would be diplomatically (edit: and militarily) privileged somehow, so that the US could operate and secure the site, and quietly have a standing plan to irreparably scram the plant and make the equipment useless in case of being overrun. My ignorance shows in lack of details, I'm afraid.
Iran, for the use case of providing nuclear power without exposing nuclear tech to a hostile power. The various countries in and including South Africa, for sponsoring stability and prosperity, since Warographics tells me they've been notably incompetent and corrupt in administering their domestic infrastructure in the last decade and might welcome some foreign investment slash paternalism.
For the benefit of the unaware, South Africa is a particularly interesting case w/r/t nuclear technology: they already have a single 1980s era nuclear power plant (supplied and partially owned by the French nuclear power company Framatome), and formerly had nuclear weapons until dismantling them in the lead-up to the end of Apartheid/power transfer to the ANC.
I wish I were knowledgeable enough to provide commentary on this state of affairs but I don't know much beyond what's on these wiki pages.
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Because it is impossible to operate a nuclear power plant at a profit anywhere. I can't find a single example of a nuclear power plant that's run at a profit without a galaxy of government subsidies - the EROEI is not high enough to do so (and no, France doesn't count). You'd have to clear that particular hurdle first, and so far nobody has managed it.
Has anyone calculated the price per KWh for nuclear to break even without subsidies, and compared that to other power sources? My problem with this argument is that energy gets subsidized up the wazoo regardless whether it's nuclear, "green", or fossil fuels, so just shouting "look, subsidies!" doesn't really prove anything.
When the cost varies by several hundred procent thats a bit hard to do.
Are we going with the cost per kW/h of a EPR1 reactor at Hinkely point C or a APR1400 reactor like the one in Barakah?
The more the merrier, but either one will do, really.
It is very hard to do which why combined with the very strong partisan interests involved and data secrecy it hasn't really been done. You have to make fairly major assumptions and these are inherently going to be politicised.
You can read the following report if you want but be aware of the severe limitations in the assumptions. https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020. Read the actual report and not what they created graphics for at the website.
My impression is that more rigorous analyses are probably only going to be done as we start to really experience the problems of decarbonisation and renewables.
I would also caution you to be very suspicious of LCOE and LCOE calculations in general. Never take them at face value.
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Sabine Hossenfelder looked at the topic and came up with numbers of Nuclear costing 2-3 times more compared to other sources of energy. Mostly due to longer building time, which increases financial costs (interest) which in turn feeds into a lot of negative feedback loops.
Nevertheless I am still very skeptical about any cost calcultions. Nuclear seems to be the worst, but it is also the most thorough source of energy where everybody is obsessed about everything due to decades long campaign against this type of energy. As far as I know it may be the only source of energy where we calculate all costs ranging from building costs, operation costs including nuclear fuel as well as decommissioning cost. I am yet to see some comparisons where let's say fossil fuel costs will also include all the damages caused by climate change, respiratory diseases and/or hypothetical costs of carbon capture and storing of all the CO2 released - that would be equivalent of nuclear waste storage and power plant decommissioning for nuclear power.
I am also vastly skeptical regarding the prices of wind/solar as this new and cheap perfect solution. Renewable energy is supposed to be the most efficient and greenest energy - and yet the one country that heavily invested in the plan of turning their energy system to this new source (Germany) sees rapid rise of energy prices. Try even googling things like "total cost of German Energiewende" and you will see widely different estimates ranging from tens of billions to trillions of EUR. The costs are hidden in various types of subsidies, surcharges but also regular infrastructure projects. I am more inclined to see the costs in hundreds of billions just by looking at one project of new north-south grid that is supposed to bring wind power from windy North to industrial South with the price tag according to Bloomberg from years ago exceeding EUR 100 billion and that was in 2020. This grid upgrade alone has the price equivalent to that of around 9 nuclear power plants similar to highly criticized one constructed in Finland. These 9 nuclear power plants could produce 130 TWh of reliable baseload output that could be thrown onto the old grid providing over 20% of energy production in Germany (all renewables now produce 40% of electricity). And we are talking only about grid cables - the costs are insane.
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They also deal with a galaxy of government regulations.
I still dont know if they'd be profitable without both the regulations and the subsidies, but it at least makes me uncertain.
I'd also guess that the best application for nuclear engines is strictly forbidden by regulations: maritime usage. The US Navy has nuclear submarines and nuclear powered aircraft carriers. The US Navy isn't stupid. Nuclear power has a really good power density ratio, especially when you are surrounded by unlimited water.
Disclaimer: all guesses, just talking out of my ass.
Maritime/naval usage is indeed the best use-case for nuclear power, and that's one of the reasons why the military uses nuclear-powered vessels.
As for the government regulations, I'm not actually too bothered by them on nuclear. I don't have a problem with laws preventing my neighbours from operating a backyard nuclear reactor or building a perfect replica of the demon core in order to test their reactions and screwdriver control. I'm sure a case can be made that those regulations are badly written and far too onerous, but I'm very happy that we do actually regulate them.
I might be misinterpreting you because of the "but" in your sentence:
It is not contradictory to think "I'm glad a thing is regulated" and "the regulations on that thing are too onerous".
A regulation can be too onerous when the cost of the regulation is greater than the expected benefit in safety.
An example: imagine a 1 in 10 chance of a $1 million dollar disaster -$100k expected value. A safety regulation reduces that chance by 50%, meaning the value of that safety regulation is $50k. If it costs more than $50k to implement it is onerous.
Some laws pass this hurdle, others don't. Seatbelt laws pass. Child safety seat laws fail.
There are multiple reasons to believe that nuclear power regulations are going to tend to be more onerous:
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Nuclear should have an excellent EROEI. The problems with profitability come from organizational dysfunction.
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Why does France not count?
Because their nuclear power system is failing, taking on vast amounts of debt and is on the verge of being nationalised due to financial problems, which is why it isn't an example of a successful, profitable nuclear power system.
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Complete and utter nonsense about EROEI.
A gigawatt plant operating 70-80% of the time for decades puts out unimaginably large amounts of power.
Uranium is less than 1% of plant operating costs.
Reactor is the only unique part, steam turbines/electric machinery used are identical to those in other plants and are you really in camp of "couple of thousand tons of reinforced concrete' require gigawatt years worth of power?
Nuclear power isn't competitive because laws were made - e.g Alara so it couldn't be.
I'm talking about the actual EROEI - this means including all of the energy required to build, staff and maintain the plant over its lifetime. Actually digging up the uranium and transporting it to the power plant might indeed be les than 1% of plant operating costs, but that doesn't mean you get to ignore the other 99% and leave them out from your calculations. A "couple of thousand tons of reinforced concrete" does actually require gigawatt years of power when you remember the complicated machinery that goes into nuclear reactors and the incredible importance of regular maintenance.
You are making an extraordinary claim and should provide the source for that BS.
I remember that hogwash from the Peak Oil years when s certain contingent of doomers was getting incredibly high on their own supply, ignoring that we have enough shitty coal for centuries of early 20th cen industry.
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Here's a breakdown on EROEI of nuclear reactors.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/energy-return-on-investment.aspx
You are probably riffing off this BS.
http://theoildrum.com/node/3877
As anyone with a modicum of general knowledge can see, these people have no idea what they're talking about whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the world nuclear gives a clear breakdown of energy needed due to materials.
I like to believe I have a modicum of general knowledge but it is not clear to me what is wrong here.
Though for start, EROI of 1.86 is still positive anyway. So it still goes against FirmWeird's claims.
For starters, the idea that gaseous diffusion could cost more energy than you can get out of splitting uranium.
Or the idea that you need to do a lot of enrichment to get useful fuel. That's only true for certain compact military and such designs, which in some cases use bomb grade material or something close to it. Famously, the RBMK reactor and the British Magnox ones can use natural uranium. It's not very efficient but good to have if you like nuclear warheads because you can extract plutonium from the 'spent' fuel.
or writing that reactors use uranium from bomb warheads. The fissile elements in practically all bombs is plutonium.
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[citation needed] for this claims
even under extreme security bondoogles required nowadays nuclear is energy positive - and if we would reduce safety requirements to match coal, hydro or solar, then costs would drop further
this does not require gigawatt years of power
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Nuclear energy is only expensive when it's sabotaged, introducing unnecessary costs in construction:
Only a factor of 4! Factor of 4 price difference within the same country is insane to think about. There was a huge spike in the cost of building reactors after three mile island (where no radiation was released and nobody died) in the US because of dumb regulations. They didn't allow any new construction for decades, preventing learning by doing. In fact, they complicated construction, demanding redesigns and tearing out parts to be replaced. Thus factor of 12 price difference in construction costs. This had nothing to do with EROEI since Korea is unaffected by US stupidity but would be affected by energy prices (since they import their fuels).
Nuclear plants can run for sixty years if designed properly (and not shut down early by Greens). They absolutely are profitable, even in the US.
See page 388, it's right there in black and white, plant profitability. If it's in brackets, it's unprofitable for the year, paying off fuel, operations and capital. If not, it's profitable. 2020 was a bad year because of low demand so no plant was profitable. But see all the years before, especially 2008! On the whole, nuclear plants are profitable, even in tough market conditions.
https://www.monitoringanalytics.com/reports/PJM_State_of_the_Market/2021/2021q3-som-pjm-sec7.pdf
And if they're profitable in the US, they're profitable in the rest of the world where things are run much more competently. These plants include many victims of the factor-of-12-megasabotage campaign.
Radioactive material stuck in the environment has negligible cost, just stick it in a box and leave the boxes in a desert. The quantities are so small it's trivial to deal with but everyone is addicted to bungling, building long-term storage complexes like Yucca mountain and then not using them.
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Is there any evidence the EROEI is negative? I've looked at a few sources and the numbers vary wildly, but they've all been positive for nuclear.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-measure-true-cost-fossil-fuels/ - this one has Nuclear as one of the lowest.
https://festkoerper-kernphysik.de/Weissbach_EROI_preprint.pdf - this study shows the opposite with Nuclear as one of the highest.
Regardless, both have a positive number for nuclear.
In general, my surface-level research has shown wildly varying levels of claims.
Wikipedia claims there was a 2019 study by the economic thinktank DIW Berlin showing no nuclear plants were profitable, but the source is some guy's blog, and his blog doesn't have a source to the article he claimed he saw it in. There then is a source to a counterclaim study that goes nowhere...
This source here says only 1/3 of US power plants are unprofitable
But on the other hand, there is this report from 2021 and 2022 indicating that at least in the northeastern part of the united states Nuclear energy was making profit in recent years.
I've even seen articles claiming renewable energy like solar and wind is cheaper and more profitable than nuclear energy, but I don't know if the profit/cost values used in the comparisons were calculated using the same methodology. Like if they're factoring in subsidies for nuclear but not for solar for example.
It's pretty clear each source is calculating costs and profits differently. All I've been able to gather from my short research is that like most hot topics, there are different groups with different biases in calculating and claiming things to support their agenda, and that it is extremely difficult for a person to be able to discern the truth without investing a lot of effort into looking into the actual methodologies and processes behind the calculation and sources of data. Perhaps I'll take a deeper look at another time.
On a somewhat related note, one thing to keep in mind about nuclear energy is that it is incredibly space efficient compared to other renewable energy sources such as wind/solar/hydro energy. There is only so much land use we can dedicate to wind/solar so as long humans continue to demand energy usage I think there is no choice but to eventually go to more nuclear energy, unless new more efficient forms of energy generation are discovered.
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Building nuclear plants in nations not indigenously able to for political or human capital reasons seems that it would promote nuclear proliferation, not non-proliferation. At the material level you are giving (non weapon)nuclear capability to non nuclear states, that is not non proliferation. And as others have pointed out - the west losing control of its expensive infrastructure investments in the 3rd world has been very common. If/when the recipient country takes control the entry cost to weaponization is significantly lower than if they didn't have a nuclear facility already.
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The US actually has done this is the past, but domestic political opposition has resulted in the projects being cancelled. Two particularly famous examples are with North Korea and Iran.
In North Korea: In 1994, the Clinton administration and North Korea signed the
Joint AgreementAgreed Framework that resulted in North Korea stopping it's nuclear program in exchange for 2 US-built nuclear power plants. The details are complicated, but essentially the new power plants were a proliferation resistant design and North Korea agreed to regular international inspections by the IAEA that would ensure no nuclear material was diverted to weapons development. The Bush administration, however, effectively canceled the agreement. The stated reason for the cancellation was that North Korea was not abiding by the terms of the agreement and was continuing to develop nuclear weapons in secret. The North Koreans claim that the US was the first to break the agreement by failing to construct the power plants and deliver other agreed upon aid.More recently in Iran: Obama signed the JCPOA in 2015 with Iran. The idea of the treaty was that the US would supply Iran with "medium enriched uranium". At 20% enrichment, this would be sufficient to power Iran's domestic nuclear power plants and manufacture medical isotopes, but would not be sufficient for weapons manufacturing. In exchange, Iran would agree to dismantle it's infrastructure for uranium enrichment. In 2018, however, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. Although Trump made claims about Iran failing to uphold it's end of the bargain, this was essentially a move to appeal to his domestic base.
In both cases, we have democratic presidents agreeing to nuclear treaties that would at least in theory prevent proliferation (and in my opinion would have). Then republican presidents dismantling those treaties. This type of pattern is very common in American international relations, and makes foreign countries (especially those not very closely aligned with US interests) very hesitant to enter longterm agreements with the US.
This vacillation in American foreign policy has long been known, and both Iran and North Korea were very hesitant to enter into these particular agreements for fear of the US not following through. Both countries, however, were under lots of internal stress at the time of the agreements (North Korea due to the breakup of the USSR and subsequent 1992 famine, Iran due to sanctions and the various middle eastern color revolutions), and they probably would not have entered these agreements if they were in a more favorable negotiating position.
(I was a nuclear officer in the US navy, and participate in unofficial diplomatic efforts with North Korea.)
Well heck. Thanks for the expert take!
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Obama played games with the definition of "treaty" to try to get around the 2/3 Senate requirement to pass them, claiming it was merely a "non-binding political commitment." Republicans had stated their displeasure, too; the House voted down a resolution of approval (269 to 162), and Senate Democrats only managed to kill the resolution of disapproval by filibustering it (54 Reps opposed, along with 4 Dems). (And yes, that is down-voted resolution of approval, and a filibustered resolution of disapproval, which is what happens when you start the process with procedural gamesmanship.) Having avoided the work of getting buy-in from Republicans, and declaring it "non-binding," you don't get to complain when Republicans feel not-bound by it.
Clinton's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreed_Framework was not the Joint Declaration you linked to, but a response to that falling apart. It was also not approved by the Senate as a treaty, again because he knew the Republican Senate did not approve of it. This was all 5 years before Bush was elected and had a chance to pounce.
So, let's adjust this statement to be accurate:
In both cases we have democratic presidents pretending to have treaties, but not actually passing a treaty like the constitution requires. Shockingly, Republican presidents did not feel bound by these non-treaties that their parties had always opposed.
I appreciate your technical clarifications. I think these corrections only reinforce my main point though that getting long term domestic support for nuclear cooperation is very hard in the US, and that's why we don't see more of it even if it could be an effective foreign policy tool.
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TO elaborate, this isn't a 1 sided fear. The reason the US vacillates is because Democrats trust these regimes to follow through, while Republicans have not. There is no domestic buy in in the US from an entire major political party. IMO for good reasons, the JCPOA, in particular, looks like it was drafted by college freshmen writing for their Intro to Middle Eastern Poly Sci class (wherein they probably don't even note or know that Iran is not majority Arab).
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Who’s trying to defuse tech tree narratives?
Opposition to nuclear comes from fears of 1) weapons proliferation and 2) environmental catastrophe. Building more plants out in the 3rd world doesn’t provide leverage on either of those blocs, so it’s a nonstarter.
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To what end? Staffed with who? Lets say you are France, probably the international leader in nukes. How are you going to get thousands of good nuclear plant employees in Ethiopia? The locals are out. They don't have the training. So you are going to have to use French engineers and operators, and heck, even janitors. And whats the premium you are going to have to pay them to live in a country either in a civil war, or on the brink of one for much of the last half century? a 100% premium? 200%? And how are you going to sell that electricity? The Ethiopians can barely afford the electricity coming out of a coal plant, let alone nuke energy that costs 3x what it does in France.
This is why Belt and Road is kind of a joke. At best it gets China some raw material mines in an exploitive posture. Developing the Congo has proven elusive because the locals are bad employees.
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The War on Kiwi Farms: The Kiwis Fight Back
I'm sure everyone here knows of the controversial site Kiwi Farms, which has been endlessly accused of facilitating online harassment, and endlessly deplatformed. The site's defense has always been that it doesn't do that, the content is completely legal in the United States, and it's just a neutral observer, and with very limited exceptions (namely protecting Chris Chan until 2021, and interfering with zoosadists), I've found that to largely be the case. But I always wondered if this attitude left them vulnerable to just being attacked endlessly like this. Like, if bad actors know that this site won't actually fight back in any way, wouldn't you expect that they would just relentlessly attack it, since they're more-or-less free to do it?
Well, recently, they've actually started doing it. They're using the tactics that have been most effective in deplatforming them, and turning it on others. Namely, filing abuse complaints with upstreams and accusing sites of violating their AUP (which stands for Acceptable Use Policy). Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT, as in HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) that isn't dispensed directly from a licensed pharmacy, often homemade and imported in to the country from shady international sources.
DIY HRT sites exist in a very legal gray area, because they more-or-less undeniably facilitate the sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals. There have been credible reports of the drugs being manufactured in really unsafe and unclean conditions, leading to issues like clearly visible human hair in a vial that's meant to be injected into your bloodstream. Furthermore, the demographic they serve raises child welfare concerns - children are the demographic most likely to be unable to access legal HRT and/or want to keep their HRT on the down low from others - and some of the marketing/labeling on the items is quite blatant (in one case, text reads "Keep away from parents" and the image is of a childlike figure). Naturally, these are the reasons Kiwi Farms uses to file abuse complaints with upstreams. And they're doing it quite openly - there's a public thread on the site where they coordinate and give information on filing abuse complaints. So has it worked?
Looking at the DIY HRT wiki, they list several DIY HRT sites that have been taken down by complaints, so certainly looks like it has. It's gotten to the point that I had to look through an archive of the DIY HRT wiki, because I couldn't connect to the live site. The irony is that, just like Kiwi Farms themselves, the sites haven't actually been taken down for good - they just hop to another web host, domain registrar, email provider, and they're back in business. And the biggest irony of all is that the DIY HRT camp don't have any recourse for this. On their subreddit, one person asks "What is stopping doing the same to KF?" and the answer is "It has been done to KF already." What are they going to do exactly, attempt to take down a site that has spent years hardening itself against being taken down? One is reminded of the Chinese parable where the penalty for being late is death. They can't be more mean to Kiwi Farms, because trans activists have already spent years being as maximally mean as possible to Kiwi Farms, kicking them out of almost every single web host and domain registrar in the world, and all that has resulted in is a horde of people pissed off that their site is being taken down by trans activism, now radicalized against the trans movement. They've been put in a situation where they can either lose, or lose but also take down others with them, and in that respect I don't blame them for finally, finally, starting to fight back.
Are they anti-trans, or just interested in a few laughs by stalking insane people making fools of themselves on the internet, a disproportionate number of whom are trans because of selection effects?
Mixture of both? But internet weirdoes who are also lolcows are more disproportionately "trans" lately. It's the mind virus du jour.
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"Anti-trans" in the same way that most people are "anti-trans"; which is to say they don't want to instantly and unquestioningly cede all ground to and meet all demands of the trans activists. They have a distaste for narcissism, entitlement and child transitioning, again, in the way that most people do.
KF users, like 4chan users before them, are not mutants that exist only on the internet. They are all around you. They are your delivery drivers, bar staff and doctors. Cashiers and postmen. They are just normal people who want to talk about things you're not allowed to talk about in public. That's it.
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If your goal is to milk lolcows, then very online transpeople would be a great target.