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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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This thought occurred after Christmas this year during a few activities where family members wanted to play a game, so they pulled up a YouTube video to demonstrate how a thing is done, and it was incredibly gross.

99% of modern kids will never have the ability to be forgotten- parents post their pictures online when they're not able to give consent, including embarrassing and compromised photos. This includes YouTube videos of moms putting their daughters in compromised positions and posting them on the video site.

Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.

I'll note that I don't have a proposed solution to this. The laws on child-porn already exist, but this content skirts the edge of acceptability. The girls are usually 10-13, and doing an innocuous activity- like playing pattycake or ring around the rosie, usually in mostly-acceptable clothing.

When you stumble on one such video, you can tell what I'm talking about. It's the camera angles.

For this reason, I come to TheMotte- have you seen the videos I'm talking about? What do you think about them, and how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?

If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?

After seeing these things, I can't get it out of my head, nor can I come up with a reasonable solution.

I haven't seen these videos myself, but I've heard people complaining about them, not unlike yourself. And like you said, nothing about the videos are explicitly sexual. It doesn't go full pedobait like Cuties. But it's still uncomfortably sexualizing. From some other complaints I've seen the dead giveaway are the comments, usually full of gross comments by pedophiles ranging from plausibly deniable to 4-chan party van. Also foot fetishist? So many foot fetishist. I guess they can't all work at Nickelodeon.

The other tell is the recommendations on those videos. There is a tread worn in the algorithm a mile deep that assumes if you like that video, you must love other gross shit that sexualizes minors.

Personally, we keep all photos of our daughter off the internet. No social media, no approval for school or businesses to post them, just absolute zero tolerance. Partially because we both have family that is unwell, unsafe, obsessive and might not leave us or our daughter alone. Also for all the usual tech-paranoid reasons about AI and corporations creating and owning a simulacrum of your soul.

I’m kinda with you, although not a blanket ban from me. The issue beyond sexuality is that the internet is forever and kids cannot actually consent to having their image and activities uploaded. What’s cute at ten might be a problem at twenty or thirty when they’re trying to build their lives. Businesses can and do look at your Facebook. A lot of women will look at social media before going on a date. And whatever images and posts they find will form an impression. Every kid including me has an edge lord phase, where they think they’re super smart and cool because they dress weird and hold a lot of weird opinions (often quite loudly). For anyone born after 1990, that phase is online ready to bite them should the wrong person find it.

Father here. Part of my job is to set her up for good partnerships.This requires her to be attentive, attractive, and to have a good social filter.

There will always be a fraction of people who are okay with jerking it to kids. I have no interest in adapting the Fast Bear Rule: making my daughter uglier/less available so pervs find a different girl. She will develop a filter & practice it like any other skill.

If I've done my job right, she won't have to worry about pedos. She just won't see them as legitimate options.

Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.

I've not seen these videos, though I recall maybe 5ish years ago, there was a minor hubbub when some YouTuber brought this kind of thing to attention, and I watched a few of them which are probably similar to what you described in this post.

In any case, this quoted paragraphs touches on a common sentiment I've seen all over the place, which I still don't fully understand. Which is the notion that these images being on some pervert's HDD is somehow harmful to the subject of the original image. At best, I could see the argument that if the subject were acquaintances with the pervert, then the pervert's perception of the subject would be corrupted in an unfair way, but even that seems like a stretch. For strangers online, I'm not sure how to rationalize this; how does an arrangement of pixels that looks like me harm me if it's sitting on a HDD somewhere that I don't know, viewed by someone I've never heard of, and using it just to get his rocks off (most likely)?

With AI generation, I think a more generic fear exists that we don't know how insight AI will be able to gather in the future from this data, so there's a bit of an unlimited downside risk, but in terms of, say, modern diffusion models, I'm not sure there's anything that harms the subject either. Without intentional training, the model won't be able to recreate the subject's appearance based on their name, so there's just about no risk in terms of privacy. And if the training using video featuring the subject's face causes the model to, by chance, recreate the face, then it's just going to be one of umpteen anonymous faces the model generates. And if perverts generate grids of pixels using AI that look similar to the subject (by chance in this case of modern AI, but conscious intent wouldn't change anything), for the purpose of getting their rocks off while viewing the image, I don't see how the subject would be harmed.

have you seen the videos I'm talking about?

No.

What do you think about them

Nothing at all until you wrote you about them, now I think...social media does all kinds of crazy stuff to people and people with it, as always.

how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?

Okay? I wouldn't find it okay for my wife to post such things with my daughter. But for others? Really quite their own problem. Once the information is out there, it's too late, the damage, if any be, is done. Can't put that back in the bottle. I suppose you could punish parents for it as discouragement, but that's state overreach in my opinion. Sucks for the children, but the world can't save children from their parents.

Also, in general, your post is very oblique and could stand to be more direct and explicit.

I haven't seen these, but the first thing that pops to my head by way of analogy is the way that close masculine friendship is now frequently coded as gay. Arab men holding hands? Gay. Two bros hugging it out? Gay. Telling your decades-long friend that you love him? Gay. Slap on the butt or other physical encouragement in sports? Gay. Just hanging out together? Believe it or not, still gay. Discouraging good, healthy, forms of masculine love is a terrible consequence of everything being interpreted through the lens of believing any two guys could be gay.

Likewise, viewing any adolescent play that isn't the platonic visual ideal of utter asexuality as an invitation to pedophiles concedes far too much ground for fear of pathology. A couple preteens playing pattycake just isn't sexual, even if weirdos are capable of interpreting it as such.

I haven't seen these, but the first thing that pops to my head by way of analogy is the way that close masculine friendship is now frequently coded as gay. Arab men holding hands? Gay. Two bros hugging it out? Gay. Telling your decades-long friend that you love him? Gay. Slap on the butt or other physical encouragement in sports? Gay. Just hanging out together? Believe it or not, still gay.

John Woo films? Total sausage fests.

The focus on male friendships in Woo's film have been interpreted as homoerotic. Woo has responded to these statements stating "People will bring their own preconceptions to a movie .... If they see something in The Killer that they consider to be homoerotic then that is their privilege. It's certainly not intentional."

That was 1989.

If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?

I have a child. I don’t care if someone uses photos for sexual purposes, the same person could masturbate to them from memory of seeing them in public. If you’re female, people will masturbate to you countless times without your knowledge and they have never needed AI to do it. People are weird, that’s life.

Still allows for the question of how 'normalized' you'd want it to become.

Presumably you wouldn't want a guy to just drop trou and start jackin' it right in sight of your kid.

And gazing at him/her creepily from the bushes while he does it is not a major improvement?

So I think parents end up conflating "jacking off at home to a sneakily taken photo" as sort of close to "hiding in the bushes and jacking off" even if there is far less danger implied by the latter.

So lets' just say that photos kept in the privacy of one's domicile are not harming anyone. How close in time and space should the masturbatory be able to get to the object of his desire before we get too uncomfortable and want to shut down the behavior?

The realm of responsibility falls on the parents. Just as they're responsible for feeding and clothing their kids and deciding what school/clubs/activities to send them to, they're just as responsible for what they choose to put online. Any personal videos you want to put out that you don't want any strangers to see should be private and access heavily restricted.

People can and will sexualize anything and everything, see rule 34. This is a touchy subject but I'm not sure we can or should do more than we already do, which is banning any explicit sexual content of children and socially ostracizing those with that kind of desire. But you can't stop or control what people think, and I draw the uncomfortable line at turning those desires into actions. If they're just engaging in masturbation in the privacy of their own home, then while disgusting, isn't doing any actual harm. But if they start compiling videos to make it easier for others to see, or invite others into their fetishes, or start reaching out to the parents/child then they are engaging in actions that actually have an impact on the person, and punishment should take place here.

Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.

Did you mean the other way around? I think I would be mortified if they were directly some captured in some internet stranger's hard drive, ai generation not so much since the output is not the same as the input. Maybe you meant specifically about deepfakes, that is something I haven't come to terms with myself since I haven't given it much thought yet.

My opinions are mostly the same as yours, but there is a potential issue in that it's difficult to exist on the internet with literally no presence.

That is, pervs who never interact with children directly are still clicking on and watching certain videos that fulfill their criteria for desirable content, which boosts the metrics on those videos according to the algorithms on the website, be it Youtube or Instagram or something else. This both makes said content more visible to other people, and provides positive feedback that this is the sort of content that becomes popular. People who care about being a "successful influencer" pay attention to popular content from other people, and also popularity of their own content, and are more likely to replicate things that were successful. In a certain respect it's sort of like AI training but in other people's brains.

Therefore, an army of pervs attempting to be stealthy but still being caught by the algorithm still end up incentivizing young girls to produce less appropriate content, even if the girls themselves don't realize why said content is popular.

I have little regard for the pedo-panic in the first place, and this is even more weaksauce compared to that.

If you're at the point where children doing entirely innocuous things, in modest clothing, is somehow a bad thing because you're worried some pedo will use it as jerkoff material, then we're at about the point where audio-visual recording of just about anyone and anything is off the table, and maybe even a ban on thinking about the children, you creep.

It also is entirely pointless to forbid it now, even for the ever illusive concerns of it ending up in AI training data. You don't think there's enough out there that people aren't making photorealistic artifical CSAM, in both photographic and video form? The cat is out of the bag, and while I'm sure there are some pedophiles who have a fetish for jailbait/"real" children, barring about 99.99% of parents from recording their kids and sharing it is so grossly overkill it's demented. You take a video of your daughter jumping on a trampoline and upload it on Insta? Well, about 6 frames can be construed as an "upskirt" shot, enjoy your ban. Discord is already banning people without recourse, including entire discord servers, if a single still image (that bald dude munching popcorn used as a reaction image), is shared, because their heuristics recognize it as a frame shared with a flagged CSAM video.

The reasonable solution, as far as I'm concerned, is to not care, or at least find something more concrete to worry about.

Small correction, that bald guy reaction image was used to cover up the actual image, which is also actually just someone eating popcorn, but the second one does trigger an instant account ban.

Thanks for clarifying! I'll take your word for it, since I am modestly attached to my Discord account and don't desire to find out the hard way haha.

I've not seen these videos. I'm not totally sure how I'd feel about it, I suspect having a kid is going to change some of these feelings but I appear to lack the ick factor about having my likeness used to train AI. As for the soft core CP stuff? I'm overwhelmingly disgusted by pedophiles but I don't really think there is a way to prevent them from ever even seeing young children. I may still not like the idea of there being a lot of content on the open web about my future children but it's not really because pedos might find it.

You cannot stop people from thinking gross thoughts. Moreover, they will be using AI in the near future to generate all they could ever want, and already do, and even if your children weren't in the dataset, it is diverse enough that something close enough to your children could be generated.

Focus on preventing real harm.

I haven't seen anything like your post mentions. But it reminds me of hearing about a few test suits where children sued their parents for invading their privacy by sharing essentially their entire childhood online.

I wonder if in the future we'll have legal codification restricting parental sharing rights, or if it will segment along class lines like so many other things.

I also wonder about what kids from families like Chris Ballenger's, whose family are streamers, will think of this 20-30 years from now.

I think there's a decent amount of precedent that would entitle the child to claim at least a portion of any money earned through the use of their image.

So the parent would be expected to have a restricted account into which the earnings go and this gets turned over to the child when they turn 18 (reasonable amounts could be deducted for the child's benefit in the meantime).

For 'mere' invasion of privacy I'm not sure what the damages would be.

And now some news from Ukraine: Gonzalo Lira is dead.

More details about his demise in Ukrainian prison.

You probably heard about him. Former pickup artist guru who turned into journalist/propagandist lambasting Ukraine and Zelensky - from Ukraine in war time. Whatever you think about him and his opinions, this tooks serious guts (and GL was well aware of the risks).

English Wikipedia finds him not enough notable and deleted him at 4th attempt, but, strangely enough, simple English Wikipedia keeps his article.

Now, he is notable enough to be noticed by Tucker Carlson and notable enough make it to Twitter worldwide trends (as for now), notable enough to be added as another reason for Red tribe to oppose supporting Ukraine.

Not smart move from Ukrainian government. You gained a little bit of sadistic revenge and even smaller bit of intimidation of people inside Ukraine (who already know well what will happen to them if they open their mouth too much). You lost rather bigger piece of credibility with people whose support you desperately need.

RIP Coach Red Pill. Whatever you were in your life, now you are symbol and martyr.

For maximally cynical, conspiratory and blackpilling take, seek, as usual Rolo Slavski.

Gonzalo Lira Was Abandoned to His Death

RIP Coach Red Pill. Whatever you were in your life, now you are symbol and martyr

No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.

If I went to Ukraine(which doesn't seem like a great idea to me, but IDK maybe I decided to get a mail order bride or something), I would keep my opinion that Crimea is part of Russia because it voted for annexation to myself in the interest of not getting murdered or imprisoned.

No, he's not,

For you and most of us here, or Soldo. For plenty of others that might be true. People swalloved Ghost of Kyiv and Sam Hyde as Ghost of Kyiv..

No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.

Nazis? Do you believe that Zelensky is a Pythonesque Jewish Nazi or are you using the Russian government's definition of Nazi?

Reports:

Redacted: Calling the Ukrainian government Nazis is a very inflammatory claim, with no justification provided Redacted: antagonistic

While this isn't antagonistic enough for me to care, it does seem a bit excessive to call the Ukrainian government Nazis.

Hyperbole? Well, that's okay, to a degree, and I think it's evident that you're implying they're authoritarian rather than literal card-carrying National Socialists. The rules regarding providing justification for one's claims are not meant to be taken quite that literally as far as I'm concerned, even if this is a subpar phrasing. You do acknowledge they're corrupt (a subjective standard, but true enough, even if less than they used to be), and that there are restrictions on speech and political affiliation because they are, in fact, in a state of Total War. I suggest the people who reported you read between a lines a tad bit more, even if you exaggerate.

Anyway, I deem this comment only mildly inflammatory, within the bounds of what I'm willing to tolerate, but I would prefer you try and be a little more polite and less pejorative in your phrasing. This isn't a warning, more of a tut-tut.

Sigh. One day the mods will be freed from accusations that we are biased in favor of Liberals/Ukraine/The Jews/Rightists and other mutually contradictory groups, but not today.

Being stupid, putting oneself at risk, being naive all seem like things that are more likely to make someone a martyr. I think he won't become a martyr because regime media in the west will simply ignore it. Or at best right wing media will cover it while regime media ignores it so it becomes a polarizing culture war issue, he'll be an Ashli Babbitt basically.

Western supporters of the Kiev regime tend to allow Ukrainians many things that they would generally not put up with closer to home and would criticize if they happened in a state that is one of the West's enemies. Things such as overthrowing a legally elected government, having numerous Nazis in their ranks, supporting chauvinistic nationalism, forcing men to fight in the army by beating them in some cases, blowing up allies' infrastructure, having kill lists of civilians who oppose them, and so on.

It is what it is. I gave up on expecting consistency from people's political attitudes a very long time ago. And finding someone who is genuinely neutral on this war rather than being a rabid partisan of either one side or the other seems to be about as rare as finding an oasis in the desert.

Gonzalo Lira was the biggest journalist covering the war from an anti-Ukrainian perspective for the first few months. I saw him everywhere and watched his content. The idea that he doesn’t deserve a Wikipedia page is crazy. He was also threatened with death early on by Ukrainian military operatives, which coincided with his long stretch of not posting.

What was the gist of his reporting? Anything contradicting the propaganda coming out of Moscow and Kiev?

The gist (as much as I can remember) was that Ukraine is destined to lose, and that the conflict was the result of Western-backed influence in Maidan / the failure to declare no NATO membership. But yeah, anything seriously critical of Ukraine is going to be labeled “propaganda coming out of Moscow”, and this in no way justifies harassing and possibly killing an ideologue and reporter.

Was he ? I've looked at what he was saying and it was either derivative/trite- what skeptics have been saying for years, and what was readily apparent from numbers etc or flat-out wrong.

Bad moves from both sides here. Coach literally livetweeted that he was going to cross at a specific border checkpoint with Hungary hours before he actually did so, and surprise surprise, he was caught and jailed. Ukraine should've kicked him out instead of keeping him because it's not like he could do actual harm to the war effort.

I don't know if this will have significant material repercussions for Ukraine. I was under the impression that Ukraine funding was slowed if not dried up entirely due to the focus on the new hot thing, the Israel-Palestine conflict.

One thing that comes to mind is comparing this with the treatment of Miles Routledge by the Taliban.

Of course it's not apples to apples, but as far as "westernized sperg goes on stroll in country where real shit is going on" it's at least somewhat comparable.

I suspect that the main difference is Miles just plays the part of an idiot whiles CRP may legitimately have been one. But the difference between pneumonia gulags and forced movie marathons is a bit stark. Especially factoring in which country had a diplomatic mission from the UK/US.

The real lesson in all this is that you don't start telling people how to run their business when you're a guest, and that goes double when they're at war.

It's too late for him, but I hope Lira's family makes it okay out of this mess.

Miles never really criticized the Taliban in-country in a way that threatened them, he was swept up as a generic Westerner whose nationality put him on the ‘enemy’ side, but he wasn’t a critic.

The US also locked up hostile propagandists in wartime (in much less desperate situations, it must be said, than Ukraine is in today). Lira knew the risks.

“Middle aged redpill e-celeb moves to BAYSED Eastern Europe to fuck Slavic teenagers; gets himself killed by advocating publicly for the military conquest of the country he’s currently in” is such a hilarious sequence of events.

Can anybody convince Rollo Tomassi to move to Taiwan?

It is objectively absurd that of all people this petty online schemer is a matter of international record, but if you put it as "55 year old American dies of pneumonia in a foreign gulag funded by his own government for political speech, leaves widow and child" it sounds more like Boulgakov than Seinfeld.

The US regularly threw Westerners (including Americans) jailed by US-allied conservative governments under the bus in the Cold War. It’s nothing new, if you were a good American Marxist and decided to start shit in a friendly reactionary Latin American country the CIA wasn’t going to bail you out.

In fact the CIA famously approved Pinochet’s killing of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, both American journalists in Chile sympathetic to Allende. And they were ex-Harvard, ex-Philips Exeter, high status and well-connected Americans, let alone washed up former pick up artists.

You lost rather bigger piece of credibility with people whose support you desperately need.

I have my doubts that Ukraine would be getting Red Tribe's support any time soon with or without imprisoning their activists who advocated against them.

Plenty of republicans support funding Ukraine war. 13% said of republican leaning it's not funded enough, 20% that funding level is about right.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/12/08/about-half-of-republicans-now-say-the-us-is-providing-too-much-aid-to-ukraine/

Congressman Crenshaw and Linsey Graham, iirc, were selling it specifically as paying for killing Russian soldiers.

My strong initial reaction is that anyone who has a clue who this guy was is a lost cause for Ukraine's lobbying.

Chris Christie has exited the Presidential race.

Does this matter? No, probably not. His campaign barely had a heartbeat outside New Hampshire. It does probably slightly raise Haley's chance of pulling off an upset in NH, as Christie's loudly anti-Trump campaign has probably attracted few voters interested in switching to the former president. But most polls still have her behind by such a margin that even getting 100% of Christie's supporters won't be enough. And even if she manages to win NH, it's highly unlikely that translates into actually winning the nomination.

To the extent it matters, it's probably because it helps Haley rather than DeSantis become the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency candidate if Trump has a heart attack or gets sent to jail or something.

I do at least give Christie credit for taking Trump on directly. The spectacle of e.g. Haley defending Trump's eligibility to be elected at the same time that he is claiming she is ineligible and should be disqualified is so undignified. Christie never had a path to win, but at least he wasn't just running for VP.

Some recent polls have her behind by less than ten points in New Hampshire, while Christie was polling there (and nowhere else) at 10% or so.

I do at least give Christie credit for taking Trump on directly.

The purpose of his candidacy seems to be parlaying a spot on the debate platform into clout in anti-Trump circles. He hasn't been in office for six years, he's disgraced because of Bridgegate, and his career as a Republican looks moribund. Most of the people in the debate using kid gloves with Trump are probably angling for an appointment down the road. That's not a concern for Christie, whose incentives run the other way.

he's disgraced because of Bridgegate

Except in New Jersey, where Bridgegate is just politics as usual and it's the beach photos of Christie at an otherwise closed Island Beach State Park which disgrace Christie and sicken everyone else.

How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?

NYT: A City’s Campaign Against Homelessness Brings Stories of Violence Local officials called for residents to deter the homeless in Kalispell, Mont., but unhoused residents said they were then accosted and attacked.

In Kalispell, city leaders approved an ordinance to punish motorists who give money or supplies to panhandlers. They shut off water and electricity at a city park where some were seeking refuge. The county commissioners wrote an open letter to the community early last year, warning that providing shelter or resources to homeless people would “enable” them and entice more of them into the area.

Homeless residents said the city’s letter unleashed a punishing public backlash, with many reporting that groups of young people were roaming through homeless encampments and tormenting those living there.

The article then notes acts of violence including eggs thrown, paintballs shot, and one homeless beaten dead (though the motive is not specified). None of this seems particularly remarkable to me, as the base rate for being subject to intra-homeless violence and general excess mortality seems substantial in any American city.

Yet the article's top reader comments predictably shout from the rooftops "cruelty", "what happened to compassion", "these so-called Christians", "it's a war against the homeless, not homelessness". Worse, I don't get the sense this chorus is particularly performative as compared to other virtue signaling hobby horses. Instead, my read, based on nothing more than a decade-long familiarity of NYT reader comments, is that a majority of the readership genuinely believes the people of Kalispell, Montana to be deplorables as a result of their anti-homeless actions.

I haven't egged, paintballed, or beaten any homeless and don't intend to start, but I firmly believe that any city will be worse off if a "compassionate" genie magically conjured up 100 homeless people to live its streets; no comment on whether I think a city should welcome a "cruel" genie who's able and willing to magically poof away the same. I also understand second order effects and believe people respond to incentives. It seems to me, then, that every compassionate Times reader equals something like 0.0001 compassionate genies, and every cruel Kalispell resident 0.01 cruel genies. Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused, and a Kalispell with a cruel lid on the homeless, and maybe even a reduction down the line.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion? Even if the rational counterarguments are themselves obvious, it seems like a fundamentally losing messaging game. We raise our children to be compassionate and we look for spouses who are compassionate. Trying to shout from the rooftops that compassion is actually bad when it comes to the homeless feels akin to telling the world that generosity is bad when it comes to tipping. Which is why I'm resigned that no matter how many articles are written about the tipping culture being out of control, it will creep up to more industries and circumstances and higher preset amounts. Similarly, I'm resigned that more tax and charity dollars will go to the homeless and the homeless industrial complex ad infinitum, because you can't argue against compassion, at least not outside of the ratsphere and among the voting masses.

But perhaps an answer is to change the framing entirely. Ivy League campus DEI would have never died from straight white men (and adjacent Asians) arguing how anti-white and anti-man the apparatus is; it's just not persuasive enough for the public long accustomed to hearing about oppression, systemic racism, patriarchy, and the value of diversity. Falling the accepted wisdom requires something entirely different, recently having one oppressed in-group fight another until the contradiction is impossible to sustain.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

Popper said it best: Tolerance for tolerant, compassion for compassionate, but franchise only for democrats, and when dealing with defectors, one must defect.

His principle is merely self-defense on the society-wide scale. One who instead blindly tolerates everyone, etc, at the very least increases instability, for contra-systemic forces are empowered.

franchise only for democrats

Was this link supposed to go here?

That one's "franchise only for Democrats" instead.

How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?

With actual compassion.

It's not like homelessness is an unsolvable problem.

Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup? More to the point, do you realize that the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%? We have plenty of excess capacity that could be turned towards solving this problem, if we wanted to.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices. We could make a big impact just by lifting the zoning restrictions that economists are already telling us to lift for non-compassionate reasons.

It may be true that some specific types of half-measures towards compassion are worse than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should accept doing nothing. It means we should use full measures.

When people make this argument it drives me nuts. I'm sorry, but I hope you don't actually believe this and honestly I think you are arguing this in bad faith and we should dismiss it because you aren't even arguing against what people are actually talking about. When people complain about the homeless, they aren't complaining about people who can't afford rent or have fallen on tough times. They are complaining about the insane people who scream at women and children and shit on the street or the drug addicts who have no intention of getting sober and leave used needles in parks children play at. Housing prices have no effect on these people because they either have no intention of getting a home, are too mentally ill for it to matter and need full time care, or would just use any housing you give them as a flop house to use and sell drugs at. The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will. Since you aren't allowed to do that, the only other thing you can do is to make it clear to them being homeless in your areas will suck and force them to go elsewhere.

The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will.

Even three months in jail (for possession) would probably work miracles. Break their cycle of compulsive using and let them sober up and give them a chance to try being something other than a junkie living in a tent in a park.

(The public thinks of jail as a fate almost like death but they’re not that bad. The best jail is probably better than the worst public school)

To be fair, I think of the worst public school as a fate almost like death.

Jail is much worse if you're a typical middle class person. If you have no family, no job, and no home, jail isn't such a step down.

Right. If you're a middle class person and go to jail, you're probably no longer a middle class person when you get out.

Going to jail doesn't stop people from using drugs -- in fact it's even worse than rehab in that not only do you meet & spend all your time with a lot of people having a shared interest in doing drugs, but these people also enjoy doing crime in order to get more drugs.

Going to jail forces them to mostly stop being floridly actively addicted for a bit. Those few months where they can think some thoughts aside from how to get their next hit of meth/fentanyl 100% of the time is the valuable opportunity here. Jail has bad parts too: person's re-integration in society becomes harder because they have a record, and they meet a lot more criminals who can teach them to do more crime.

But, this forced sobering up might also be the only tool our society has that stops them from being a junkie destined to overdose in the near future committing crime the whole way.

That's just it -- it's pretty easy to get drugs in jail, drugs addicts that are sent there don't (generally) sober up.

And zero interest in helping you get off drugs. Negative interest really, if they're cooking or supplying helping you get clean cuts into their bottom line.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices.

Is this correlation or causation? What do you think it's like being homeless in small town Indiana? Way shittier than San Francisco or Seattle, I guarantee, both in terms of support for subsistence as well as entertainment and amusement.

The chronic, problematic homeless have very little incentive to stick around where they grew up, their families, local support networks, because they have already lost or devalued them. The people shitting or shooting on sidewalks in SF have already exhausted the patience of those who once cared about them.

People want to deny this for some reason, and say that the vast majority of SF homeless are former SF residents, implying that maybe they've never left.

The question I would ask any homeless in SF:

Did you once rent or own here? Have you ever lived anywhere else?

As for why they might choose SF over Indiana, I hope it's obvious.

Did you once rent or own here? Have you ever lived anywhere else?

From the 2019 San Francisco homeless survey

With the relevant 2019 answers being-

Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years. Six percent (6%) reported living in San Francisco for less than one year.

Eight percent (8%) of respondents reported living out of state at the time they became homeless. Twenty- two percent (22%) reported living in another county within California.

Thirty percent (30%) of respondents reported living in a home owned or rented by themselves or a partner immediately prior to becoming homeless. Thirty-three percent (33%) reported staying with friends or family. Twelve percent (12%) reported living in subsidized housing, and 5% were staying in a hotel or motel. Six percent (6%) of respondents reported they were in a jail or prison immediately prior to becoming homeless, while 4% were in a hospital or treatment facility, 3% were living in foster care, and 1% were in a juvenile justice facility.

I have a prior against the accuracy of the surveys, as there is definitely a "narrative" to uphold, and I have to imagine the survey takers are themselves homeless advocates and activists, more interested accumulating and distributing resources than hardheaded analysis. Still, taking these numbers at face value:

Of 100 homeless people:

  • 30 were homeless elsewhere and moved to SF
  • 4 became homeless within a year of moving to SF
  • 28 were living housed in SF for between 1 and 10 years
  • 38 were living housed in SF for more than 10 years

How does one randomly sample homeless people? Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police. I can imagine the sampling in this survey was done via more "official" means, like those contacting advocacy orgs, shelters, case workers, etc. There are very real methodological difficulties here. I haven't yet dug into the details of the survey, but maybe you are familiar with it?

Smells like narrative to me too. But even if we accept the numbers are accurate, I don't see how having a high percentage of locals changes the bottom line. SF has had high levels of out-migration to other cities and states for years, with cost of living being the top cited reason. Presumably the vast majority of these who moved did not end up homeless in their new locales. Why should policy reward those who chose to stay behind and end up homeless? Seems to me society is better off if it incentivized mobility so people on the verge of homelessness at a HCOL area can have a home in a LCOL area.

Not beyond what is covered in the document itself, but yes any survey like this is going to be biased because at the bare minimum the respondents are cooperative and capable enough to answer a survey instead of stabbing the person attempting to administer it or simply staring into space when asked questions.

Here is how they said they got responses:

Surveys were conducted by peer survey workers with lived homeless experience who were referred by local service providers. Training sessions were facilitated by ASR, City staff, and community partners. Potential interviewers were led through a comprehensive orientation that included project background information as well as detailed instruction on respondent eligibility, interviewing protocol, and confidentiality. Peer survey workers were compensated at a rate of $7 per completed survey. It was determined that survey data would be more easily obtained if an incentive gift was offered to respondents in appreciation for their time and participation. Socks were provided as an incentive for participating in the 2019 homeless survey. The socks were easy to distribute, had wide appeal, and could be provided within the project budget. The incentives proved to be widely accepted among survey respondents.

Based on a Point-in-Time Count estimate of 8,035 homeless persons, with a randomized survey sampling process, the 1,054 valid surveys represented a confidence interval of +/- 3% with a 95% confidence level when generalizing the results of the survey to the estimated population of individuals experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. The 2019 survey was administered in shelters, transitional housing facilities, and on the street. In order to ensure the representation of transitional housing residents, who can be underrepresented in a street- based survey, survey quotas were created to reach individuals and heads of family households living in these programs. Strategic attempts were also made to reach individuals in various geographic locations and of various subset groups such as homeless youth, minority ethnic groups, military veterans, domestic violence survivors, and families. One way to increase the participation of these groups was to recruit peer survey workers. Since 2009, the ASR survey methodology has prioritized a peer-to-peer approach to data collection by increasing the number of currently homeless surveyors. In order to increase randomization of sample respondents, survey workers were trained to employ an “every third encounter” survey approach. Survey workers were instructed to approach every third person they considered to be an eligible survey respondent. If the person declined to take the survey, the survey worker could approach the next eligible person they encountered. After completing a survey, the randomized approach was resumed.

And their self-admitted problems with their methodology:

The 2019 San Francisco Homeless Survey methodology relies heavily on self-reported data collected from peer surveyors and program staff. While self-report allows individuals to represent their own experiences, self-reported data are often more variable than clinically reported data. However, using a peer-to-peer interviewing methodology is believed to allow respondents to be more candid with their answers and to help reduce the uneasiness of revealing personal information. Further, service providers and City staff members recommended individuals who would be the best suited to conducting interviews and these individuals received comprehensive training about how to conduct interviews. Service providers and City staff also reviewed the surveys to ensure quality responses. Surveys that were considered incomplete or containing false responses were not accepted, the process for which included reviewing individual surveys submitted by surveyors and assessing patterns in survey responses for inconsistencies. It is important to recognize that variations between survey years may result from shifts in the demographic profiles of surveyors and accessibility to certain populations. Survey confidence intervals presented indicate the level of variability that may occur from year to year when interpreting findings. While every effort was made to collect surveys from a random and diverse sample of sheltered and unsheltered individuals, the hard-to-reach nature of the population experiencing homelessness prevents a true random sampling. Recruitment of diverse and geographically dispersed surveyors was prioritized. However, equal survey participation across all populations may be limited by the participation and adequate representation of subpopulations in planning and implementation processes. This includes persons living in vehicles, who are historically difficult to enumerate and survey.

Edit :To your point:

Is this a representative sample? I would survey most egregious cases first -- the zombies milling about the UN plaza in the open air drug market. The shitters, shooters, hitters, harassers, yellers. Maybe the ones with the most encounters with police.

I am not sure how this would be a more representative sample of the homeless population as a whole. I do think that for many matters involving the homeless it would be far more useful to drill into the disruptive + perennial homeless population rather than those who are unobtrusive or temporary. Though there are obvious difficulties in collecting data on those actively working against you doing so.

Great response. No quibbles. Fully agreed on final paragraph.

Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices.

Could that be because both homeless people and non-homeless people want to live in certain areas, while the latter pay for the privilege and thereby drive up housing prices?

Probably not. The vast majority of homeless people became homeless in their current locale, which suggests the relationship is people move to attractive location => housing costs go up => some segment of the population that wasn't at risk of becoming homeless now is => individual episodes of misfortune amongst the now-larger at-risk population lead to more homeless people.

Ah, that additional data does give a clearer picture.

At 650k homeless and 500k per unit of housing, that’s 320 billion which is maybe doable for the federal government. Double that price (for California) and not so much. I have no idea what the ongoing maintenance cost for that housing would be - a typical house is .5%. Let’s 10x to 5% which is tens of billions per year. Having said that, we’ll manufacture more homeless next year and it’s not like we have the infra, materials, real estate or man power to actually build all of that anyway. I’m not sure this is actually fixable with money after all.

Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup?

It's hard to get exact numbers, but between the city, state, and non-profits, the spending on San Francisco's homeless is on the order of 1 billion per year. That's like $4000 per San Francisco household, and a far cry from "beer and makeup" money.

What has SF received in exchange for these billions spent? Nothing but more squalor, decay, and crime. That's because more money is either useless or actively harmful. Solving homelessness is a fairly intractable problem if all you have is a carrot and no stick.

Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem. Last year in King County (Seattle), there were 1293 drug overdose deaths. In 2022, there were 1001. In 2021, there were 708. In 2020, there were 509. In just 3 years, overdose deaths increased 150% from an already high level.

These are the drug deaths. Imagine how many drug users there are. Imagine trying to get a job or respond to government incentives if you are addicted to fentanyl.

The best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to arrest, prosecute, and jail fentanyl dealers. Maybe this wouldn't save our current batch of junkies. But it would stop new ones from being created.

SF is more or less the poster child for "I will do anything to end homelessness but build more housing". It's not surprising that their spending on homelessness has failed to resolve the issue when they've made only the most tepid efforts to actually house the homeless rather than just ameliorate their conditions.

Housing isn't the problem. Drugs are the problem.

Drugs aren't the problem. They're a problem, but West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates (this pattern is true in weaker forms across the rest of Appalachia and parts of the Midwest).

I have the misfortune of visiting San Francisco. When I bitterly complain about the aggressive street-shitting drug-addled homelessness people, I don't mean to say that they'd be productive citizens if only $1000/month studio apartments existed.

Sure, rezone and build some high rises. Step 2: the guy screaming while he sprays diarrhea onto the sidewalk for some reason doesn't get a lease in one. What shall we do with this man when more multi-home zoning doesn't fix his drug-fried brain?

I currently reside in a city that has a homelessness rate similar to SF. While there are some really unhinged characters, the vast majority are merely visibly homeless (which, I will grant, still puts people off - most people don't like being accosted by scruffy strangers asking for money). Cheap housing won't transform them into model citizens, but it will get them off the street and facilitate enforcement against the more genuinely anti-social. I don't know, maybe the SF vagrants are built different.

Perhaps more importantly, it alters the homelessness-generating function. As mentioned, WV is dirt poor and full of addicts, but they are able to die of a fentanyl overdose in the comfort of their own living room, because housing in WV is cheap enough that even a marginally employed fent addict can afford a place to live. If the current crop of homeless contains a large share of people who are unfixable to the degree the only real choice for them is whether or not their cell has padding, preventing more people from ending up in that circumstance is a major part of actually fixing the problem.

Point taken, I guess I was responding to GoodGuy's attitude that "it's just so simple". It's really not.

  1. Which place has "built more housing" and solved their homeless problem. People were pointing to Salt Lake City as an example. As far as I know that has utterly failed now.

  2. Which place has successfully housed fentanyl addicts at reasonable cost

West Virginia has one of the highest drug overdose rates and lowest homelessness rates

I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington. But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia. So West Virginia is outsourcing their drug problem elsewhere.

Even if housing prices are a root cause, we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems. Many places with cheap housing in the Midwest have had declining populations for decades. West Virginia has a lower population today than it did in 1950. On the other hand, the U.S. has built tons of homes and has the same amount of housing per capita as in the year 2000.

The amount of housing we'd need to build to make a dent is huge. Marginal increases aren't going to cut it. Cutting rent from $3000/mo to $2800/mo isn't going to make SF any more affordable for the fentanyl addict. So what's the cost of increasing our housing stock by 20%? There are 144 million homes in the U.S. Building new ones is very expensive, on the order of let's say $350,000 per (a huge underestimate for places like SF). So it would cost $10 trillion to build enough homes, although of course in practice it would be impossible.

Building housing is not really workable. It's too damn expensive. I would be in favor of measures that make homes a much worse investment in order to curtail market speculation. But I don't think it'd fix the homeless problem.

But it's worth pointing out that drug addicts don't move to West Virginia, they move AWAY from West Virginia.

Drug addicts mostly don't move anywhere. I've never seen any evidence that bears out the idea that there's a significant mobile homeless population migrating towards the most accommodating locales. As near as I can tell, it's the opposite: homeless addicts (and homeless generally) are overwhelmingly in the locality where they became homeless, and where they aren't they're usually near-ish.

we'd have to build a LOT of housing to solve our problems.

True.

There are approximate 1,500,000 new housing starts in the US per year. If we take your estimated cost per unit of 350k (tbh I think this is high, but this is all ROM so it's not going to radically change the picture), we're already spending ~$525b/year. $5T over ten years. Hitting the 20% you suggested entails doubling that. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot of money, but an extra $5T over years for a country with the wealth of the US is not some inconceivable sum. Especially considering that most of it would be coming from the private sector rather than the government. (I also note that it is probably overkill - housing shortages are highly concentrated. WV doesn't need to increase its housing stock at all, CA needs to increase it a lot)

I'd also note that marginal shifts do matter. If the average rent goes down by $200, that suggests low end rent is also going down. It may not be a radical, sweeping improvement, but there will be people who can afford housing who couldn't before or who move from precarious to... less precarious. If building housing is unworkable than that is in effect saying the problem is unsolvable. Solving the opioid crisis is a worthy political goal, but it won't do much for homelessness.

I'd have to see if that's even true anymore with the huge increase in overdose rates in places like Washington.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm

Even if it's equalized in the intervening time, it doesn't alter the underlying point that the relationship between drug ODs and homelessness rates are not strongly correlated. A hypothetical scenario where WA and WV have the same OD rate but WA has four times the homelessness rate does not suggest drugs are driving homelessness. On the other hand, the median home price in Charleston is $150k, in Seattle it's $800k.

Wonder if all the confusing noise can be cleared up if a city managed to build a sufficient number of bare bones housing that the bulk of the local homeless simply do not want to live in. As it stands, the call to build more housing is all muddled up between the (imo) legitimate call to ease zoning and environmental regulations and the (imo) facile crutch that a city should not be cruel because the simple compassionate answer is to build more.

the (imo) facile crutch that a city should not be cruel because the simple compassionate answer is to build more.

Contra this, there is a certain fetishization of cruelty - often disgust papered over with affected ruthlessness ("sometimes hard choices are necessary; this is a hard choice, therefore it is necessary) - when it comes to discussions of how to handle the homeless/drug addicts/[insert undesirable here]. There is a great deal of room in between the idea that kindness requires us to tolerate anti-social behavior from homeless people and endorsing extra-legal violence against them.

In particular, I tend to find a tendency to underestimate how harshly the homeless are currently treated. For example, I often see the question asked "why don't they break up homeless encampments?" or similar sentiments. And the answer to that is that in most cities they do (to the extent that it's legal to do so). But this doesn't actually accomplish very much - they might temporarily move to a different street, but it can't meaningfully fix the problem because the homeless don't have anywhere to go. Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.

Selfish local remedies (e.g. bussing out the homeless) tend to be zero sum, since other localities implement the same measure and you waste a bunch of money pushing the homeless back and forth grandstanding about how tough you are on vagrants.

It's a nice thought to think one categorization up, but akin to Theresa May's warning of citizen of nowhere, in practice Texans aren't going to be losing too much sleep over the welfare of people in NYC or Chicago forced to deal with bussed migrants, just as the latter cities never lost much sleep over Texans.

I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread that one way this can be positive sum is to better match what a community is willing to give with how much it actually gives--let the compassionate sanctuary cities provide the sanctuary, and let the cruel law and order states enforce rule of law.

The best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to arrest, prosecute, and jail fentanyl dealers.

To be the devil's advocate: the true best thing we can do to reduce homelessness right now is to spike drugs with enormous elephant-killing doses of carfentanyl.

I'm not saying, "Do it," I'm just saying to run it through the computer and check. It'll say that it won't help, and I'll stop going on about it.

It's crazy, but fentanyl is probably making a dent in the homeless population. With 3,000 deaths in last 3 years, that means 0.1% of the county's population has died of an overdose.

Possibly something like 10% of the people living on the streets have died of a fentanyl overdose in the last 3 years.

A few years ago I read an article from a group of journalists in some Midwest city on their experiences following police and ambulances for a week. All the drug addled homeless they saw. All the fatal overdoses they saw, seemingly miraculously reversed and the dead brought back to life by narcan.

I can't seem to find the full write up now, but here is one of the fun parts.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

But more seriously, yes, fentanyl and it's equivalents have surely killed off a significant minority of the would-be indigent population. And the fake not-meth cooked by the cartels is rotting the brains of much of the rest. This is an enormous tragedy seemingly unnoticed by almost everyone.

Insane story. Yeah, Narcan has saved many. I've heard anecdotes about the same person being revived a dozen times by paramedics.

I mentioned elsewhere on this forum that I am mostly a libertarian. Addictive and deadly drugs are one of the few areas that I am not. The harms to society are just too great.

I find it bizarre that some people would defend statements like "you need a license to cut hair" while at the same time saying "if someone wants to sell an addictive and lethal drug that's fine". And yet that is the status quo we've arrived at in places like SF and Seattle.

Overdoses deaths are like 10x what they were during the so-called War on Drugs.

If you like the sound and feeling of dental drills pressing into you, you'll love the emergency drill used to bore holes into the bones of fentanyl addicts. And then the addict in question comes back to life and runs off with a medical stent sticking out of his leg. The costume designers for Hellraiser are reading this and thinking it's a bit too much.

Hmm, I've never actually seen an interosseous injection or infusion, I always assumed it involved a very sturdy needle and a hammer, but I suppose power tools make more sense.

The dealers are just people responding to market incentives. If you arrest them, someone else will take their place.

I can understand the people who look at the crime that results from drug prohibition and try to estimate that it is higher than would be from increased drug usage in the population. Reasonable minds can estimate those factors differently. What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd. At least with the former, one could have the faintest of theoretical support if they posited a totally inelastic demand curve, one that could not even be shifted by applying/removing literal criminal penalties. This still seems like a pretty whack assumption, but that's what you'd need to even get the weakest version of this sort of claim.

Addicts are relatively insensitive to cost fluctuations. Sure maybe the equilibrium will drop slightly, but I don’t think” arrest the dealers” (if you can identify and incarcerate enough of them without authoritarian measures) isn’t going to solve the problem in a way that would be satisfactory to me.

You're not thinking marginally. Any demand curve has "high value consumers". The "addicts", so to speak. They're the ones all the way up at the top left part of the curve. Literally no other product in existence leads people to reason by way of, "There are some high value consumers of this product; therefore, the entire demand curve is nearly perfectly price inelastic." None.

Years back, in the old old place, we analyzed published estimations of the price elasticity of marijuana. I can try to find some time to dig it up. In the meantime, would you like to venture a guesstimate?

What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd.

Aren't there some goods for which lowering their price actually decreases the quantity sold, because it allows people to substitute it with more expensive, higher quality products? However, I've also been told that this was just a hypothetical good speculated by some economists rather than something observed to exist in reality.

But either way, I think almost no one thinks to model this type of thing in terms of supply and demand. There was another comment a couple days back here about why Freddie DeBoer and/or people like him didn't find it obvious that slut shaming was a metaphorical form of unionizing by women in the metaphorical mating market where I think the same phenomenon happens. For some topics, people tend to see as almost supernatural in how they're free from the basic laws of reality, and both crime and love fit into those things. As for why people treat these things as supernatural instead of bound by reality, I think it mostly has to do with how most people, most of the time, including people like me who write on this site, prefer to feel good than to be right. Being right takes hard work, research, skepticism, correcting self-biases, modeling, etc. But it's easy to believe that whatever my side is saying about some controversial topic is correct, and it feels so damned good to do so.

It still shifts the supply curve leftwards. No one ever said it would eliminate the supply completely.

Huh? No they won't. The chance of getting arrested changes the incentives.

the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices

Yeah sure, offer all of them a spot in a shelter or halfway house.

And then the unrelated problem of crazy aggressive street-dwelling drug addicts will remain. Because there are two problems here: homeless "but there for the grace of God go I" and by-choice drug addicts. No one forced the meth pipe into their mouth.

And if housing prices were so high that you and I couldn't live in our current places: we'd move. We wouldn't move to a city park and get really high and yell at people and shit on the sidewalk.

I want compassion for the homeless. I support shelters for them somewhere far from my neighborhood and I want huge Chinese-style concrete housing blocks legalized on the city core. And we are going to need some other strategy for the drug-addled street-shitters.

In an alternate world, considering China has a glut of housing in its ghost cities and a population bomb, America can send its homeless over along with a big fat check for each.

  1. Is it possible that housing pricing is correlated with cities and cities may be easier for homeless people to navigate? That is, high home prices don’t cause homelessness but instead is a function of the same thing that attracts homelessness.

  2. Other argument is people aren’t really worried about the working homeless that housing prices may cause. Instead, they are worried about the drugged out crazy.

  1. It's possible, but my understanding is that the homelessness is highly correlated with housing prices between cities in a way that's hard to square with that assumption, and that homelessness rates responds to changes in housing prices too quickly for anything like that to be a plausible mechanism. Not an expert though, feel free ot research it more and report back.

  2. Maybe, but a lot of the money and political capital that gets spent on 'homelessness' as an issue end up going to support the working/sane homeless. Take them out of the equation, maybe we find that the drugged out crazies are actually a really small population that we could help pretty cheaply. It at least resolves the confound between the groups and lets us work on the problem more directly.

I think it’s likely that the correlation is caused by far left politics that favor both impediments to building housing and funding homelessness.

the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%?

It's actually 85% when you remove people past retirement age.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

You can get paid six figures working at a buc-ees in rural Alabama. The 15% not participating in the labor force have reasons for this and are unlikely to be interested in government make-work.

Considering stay at home parents, students and people between jobs or purposefully marginally employed: that's really high.

I thought labor participation rate was at an all time low, but this sounds sensible.

People between jobs or marginally employed usually count as the labor force, but yes.

Can you spell out why you believe that giving things to the homeless, or abstaining from assaulting or expelling them, is bad? Is it just the "more of them will move into the area" thing (so it's bad that they disgrace some people who don't want anything to do with them with their presence, as opposed to... staying somewhere far away from civilisation? If they otherwise just hung out in another city, the total number of people unwillingly exposed to the homeless would be about the same), or do you actually think that this materially increases the number of homeless (either by keeping them alive when they would otherwise die, or by incentivising people to become homeless who otherwise wouldn't)?

It seems to me that the last theory would require extraordinary evidence, and the "homeless would stay in the woods if civilisation were successfully hostile to them" route can be expected to result in them dying all the same (I'd guess that the majority of people who are homeless don't have the executive function/skill level to eke out a living on land that is so useless as to remain unclaimed by civilisation). If your ask amounts to solving the homeless problem by accelerating the homeless-to-dead pipeline, you should be explicit about it, because the main obstacle to realising your proposal will be that upon reflection most people will be against it on moral principle, and this topic attracts enough attention that you can't hope to sneak some policy past the public without them realising this.

I would think the point is instead "accelerating the homeless here to homeless in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco pipeline". As South Park explained many years ago with their "California is super cool to the homeless" song.

There's a big difference between NYC homeless problem, California homeless problem, and Kalispell, Montana having a homeless problem. NYC homeless are people who are/were otherwise living in NYC and wind up on the street, NYC faces relatively little risk of attracting outsize homeless population to the working population, NYC is simply so large that its resources will be large enough to handle the situation. California cities attract some homeless people, who like the mild weather, and faces some risk of attracting too many homeless people if they are too generous, but again has a large economy and resources to handle them.

Kalispell, Montana can quite easily attract too many homeless people for a town of 20k residents to handle. We have no concept of residency in a town, as opposed to a state, and a strong tradition of freedom of movement between states. If Kalispell is facing a wave of homelessness among people who grew up in Kalispell and its environs then Kalispell has some responsibility to care for them. But to say that Kalispell must care for thousands of homeless residents raised anywhere in the United States is difficult. And if Kalispell is too generous, they may run that risk, of thousands of bums finding their way to town to take advantage of the situation.

The effect of the carrots and sticks is largely to displace them to areas that are more willing to give up beauty, cleanliness, safety, tax dollars etc. vs. areas that are less willing to. Seems Pareto optimal for all involved, including the homeless themselves for a sufficient amount of sticks should they stick around in a hostile region.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem? Is it possible to effectively campaign for the cruel genie?

I know your post ties these questions together but I think they are actually pretty distinct.

For the first question, one of the best grounds to argue against compassion is its effectiveness. Pretty much no one wants homeless people to exist for their own sake. Even the "compassionate" side wishes there were no (or fewer) homeless people. The question is do compassionate means actually function to reduce the homeless population? Are we willing to devote the kind of resources that would be necessary for those means to succeed? As @guesswho says, we could just build every homeless person a house if we were willing to commit that level of resources. The best way to attack compassionate solutions is probably to argue against their effectiveness, either in total or in terms of tradeoffs. "This thing might be good to do but would not be worth it" is an argument everyone can understand (though perhaps disagree).

On the second question it depends on what you mean by "cruel." If you think we should merely leave the homeless alone, devoting no resources to helping them, I think that becomes a variation in the tradeoff argument I discussed above. On the other hand if you want to inflict some more active harm on them you are going to have problems. My impression is lots of people think some good reason is required to justify harming other people. Those people do not generally regard "does not have a permanent residence" as being a good reason. Often discussions about homelessness focus on other bad things homeless people often do as justification but is this other behavior that is functioning as justification, not homelessness itself.

I think it is more important from the perspective of modeling the internal process of people who want to deal with homelessness with compassion. The OP describes the "compassion" genie as magically creating 100 more homeless people. But what is compassionate about that?

I agree the effects are not as cleanly separable as I might like but sometimes it feels like people don't even try. When I hear people talk about the "homeless" in an unqualified way I assume they mean it in an unqualified, not "a specific subset of homeless people who engage in particular behaviors."

So, basically "can't have shit in Detroit".

Speculatively extending Scott's speculative hypothesis on set points, say a quarter of the enshittification proponents cannot be shamed, however ruthlessly you try, because they are miserable SOBs that proactively want the city to be shitty, because then they feel less bad about themselves. This advances the vicious cycle as the shitty environment makes them feel even worse, so they resist efforts to uplift the surroundings even more, and we end up with a third of people in this camp, then a half.

I suspect that the number of long term homeless whose poor behavior is solely or even mostly attributable to their homelessness to be very low; as far as I can tell the whole ‘just give them trailers or tenements to live in’ strategy has been tried and it didn’t work very well because they didn’t remain fit to live in.

I'm comfortable with saying that it's deplorable to throw eggs at homeless, shoot paintballs at them, beat them, or infringe on people's liberty to give each other money.

It's just that it would be silly to judge the entire town as deplorable because those things happened.

It's just that it would be silly to judge the entire town as deplorable because those things happened.

Not if you want a casus belli to force toxic compassion unto it.

infringe on people's liberty to give each other money.

How do you feel about people's liberty to feed bears? Giving vagrants money is apt to have a similarly salubrious effect on the local quality of life as feeding the local bear population.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

Have more children. That simple. People redistribute their compassion quite a bit when they have family. I think that a lot of carebearing that we have lately is just the desire to take care of something and the thing most people would have otherwise in history is children. Right now it is at most dog or cat.

Also we better find out soon how people to prioritize their compassion, otherwise the flood of migrants that we deal with right now will become biblical in proportions.

Interesting model. I wouldn't call it simple per se, and suspect you say it more for dramatic flair, but as a solution it seems persuasive.

You need to make the public understand how chronic stresses add up and lead to obesity, cancer, etc. Someone soliciting 500 people at an intersection is someone giving 500 people needless stress. The negative consequences of this are not canceled out by the benefit to the homeless man. Same with a park — a person should be able to walk in one rare beautiful piece of nature without seeing sprawled junk and disheveled tents. The benefit of this stress-free nature exposure is, ironically, protective against the possibility of developing homelessness in the future.

Anyway I would write something like, “we have noticed an uptick in minor trauma and stress responses among our residents, including women and lower income minorities. We have traced this stress response to the individuals who are soliciting money to stressed drivers trying to watch for incoming traffic; this is not just distracting, but it reminds many residents of their own lack of financial stability. In order to safeguard our most at-risk residents from further stress, we are going to make soliciting for money in public illegal. We instead ask everyone to donate to a town-wide fund for our poorest residents. The town will match dollar per every $400 donation. We are also going to ensure that our parks are free from unnecessary stressors.”

Love this. Unfortunately the hierarchy of oppression seems to me unweighted, so because chronic stress ranks beneath poverty, it doesn't matter that 500x chronic stress > 1x homeless. Maybe a clever thought leader could try upgrading solicitation to rape, and since rape still out-oppresses poverty, society could rightfully lock up all the rapists who invade the psychological safe spaces of BIPOC folx.

Yeah, great answer. Chronic stress kills.

Unfortunately as @Fruck says, our entire worldview, especially the medical establishment, is firmly against chronic stress being an issue. Just take a look at muscular injuries. While many doctors such as John Sarno have done great research and essentially proven that most chronic injuries are psychosomatic, the modern establishment view within medicine is that pretty much all injuries are mechanical, and need to be fixed with surgery. The idea that chronic stress over time leads to emotional issues which lead to physical pain is a massive threat to the current medical system.

There are a lot of researchers, doctors, and therapists doing good work in the chronic pain space, but boy are they fighting an uphill battle. And just imagine trying to tell someone "Yeah well... you didn't really need that shoulder surgery that cost you (or likely other taxpayers) tens of thousands of dollars, but it was probably easier than getting you to do some self-reflection and actually fix your personal problems." It's not exactly a sexy argument to make.

the modern establishment view within medicine is that pretty much all injuries are mechanical,

This is a gross oversimplification. The consensus view of pain is the biopsychosocial model.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6067990/#:~:text=The%20biopsychosocial%20model%20of%20pain,that%20reciprocally%20influence%20one%20another.

The thing about Sarno is that his model is pretty much only psycho.

Yes this is the consensus view in chronic pain science - do you think it’s the consensus view among everyday doctors, especially those for specific disorders like carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, tendinitis, etc etc? Hell no.

Most of these doctors haven’t even heard the term biopscyhosocial. I can tell you that confidently because I spent almost ten thousand dollars and got 30+ different opinions from these doctors for my own chronic issues, and only found out about the biopsychosocial model myself. All this less than five years ago.

I even acknowledge that there are doctors doing good work in the chronic pain space, as you discuss. But to call my claim a gross oversimplification is simply not true.

While I'm no fan of the homeless, I really don't think chronic mental stress can cause SLAP tears.

No idea what SLAP tears are, but hey man the link between mental stress and physical injuries keeps getting validated to impact more and more issues that were previously thought to be mechanical.

Anything that is caused or exacerbated by ‘stress’ is an excellent candidate.

Personal bugbear: Superior Labrum, Anterior to Posterior. The labrum is a bowl of cartilage that provides passive stabilization of the shoulder joint, which in humans is significantly less structurally sound in exchange for a greater movement envelope. The labrum can be torn by heavy exertion at the edges of the envelope or by the proximal head being driven through the labrum, as in holding your arms rigid during a car crash.

That wouldn't work man, because people can't wrap their heads around cumulative issues. You can't make them understand because to understand that they would have to do a lot more work thinking about shit. If you say "ok take the stress of that guy selling oranges and add it to the stress of the guy wagging his dick at you on the overpass", they check out at the word add every time. "You want me to think about things instead of instantly defaulting to my knee-jerk reaction? Fuck you, this is America!" You have to go the other way, make it easier to think about somehow.

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

By showing that what is claimed is compassionate is not really so.

There's a lot of ruin compassion in a Nation, especially a wealthy and liberal one.

But not infinitely or indefinitely so. Eventually, even the bleeding hearts stop, if only because they exsanguinated.

For example, see how the sentiment has turned against Middle-Eastern immigrants in the Nordic states, from them once being misunderstood darlings to far more Right-wing and integrationist parties coming into vogue as a battered populace changes their mind.

The same is true for many YIMBYs and people-of-houselessness defenders, who get a rude wakeup call when the homeless are camping in their neighborhood parks, ruining their public transport, and clearly demonstrating that efforts to simply be nice to them by offering housing, shelter or safe drugs are far from sufficient to solve the problem, at least for the worst homeless who are either crazy or too addicted/drug-addled to respect carrots and not sticks.

Of course, this does require things to get worse, and people can be stupidly kind longer than your housing market or appetite for Hep-B can bear, but it can happen and is happening. I've seen plenty of outcry on Twitter from Californians outraged that what their politicians had wrung hands about as an unavoidable problem of the homeless ruining the place mysteriously vanished overnight when Xi Jinping visited. Huh. It seems the state capacity to handle homelessness exists all along, just a lack of will to use it.

While I don't endorse Accelerationism in general, since I'd much prefer finding a solution that isn't "let it all burn to the ground knowing it'll be built back better", I still think that the general ethos has a point, at least when it comes to shocking the complacent into noticing reality.

people-of-houselessness

It's "people experiencing homelessness", deplorable. Report to your local bugpod for re-education.

Excuse me? Is it okay these days to just assume that other people have the privilege of a bugpod to retreat to, especially with the recent budget cuts to education?

In Airstrip One, we have a bugpod in every fifteen minute city. Has Emmanuel Goldstein sabotaged the provision of bugpods in your District?

Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused

The alternative hypothesis is that the homelessness in San Francisco is driven by a very brutal housing market.

For example, this paper finds that "a 10% reduction in housing costs is estimated to lower homelessness rates by around 4.5%". The median rent in SF is $3275 and $1434 in Kalispell, MT (i.e. 130% higher in SF).

It always kind of confuses me that people think treating the homeless a little bit meaner or nicer will have a meaningful effect. Being homeless really, really sucks. I don't think it is the lack-of-sucking that enables the homeless to keep being homeless.

Seriously think about it: you've homeless for 4 years, have no education, references, or work experience. 2/3 long-term homeless have mental health issues and 2/3 have drug issues, so tack on one of those.

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?

(This isn't to say that typical "compassionate" solutions are effective either)

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job?

The paintballs are motivation to be homeless somewhere else. A local solution that is not masquerading as a global solution.

I don’t think @vpn’s comment is advocating for trying to create a negative sum game where cities race to the bottom to be as nasty as possible to the homeless, but he’s welcome to correct me.

As the others have noted, the cruel response is meant to motivate the homeless to go somewhere else. This seems optimal if it means moving them from a place that wishes to make itself known as "cruel" [to the chronically homeless] to a place that wants itself seen as "compassionate".

I'll add too that it's also optimal if it means moving them from high cost of living to low COL areas.

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the motivation behind the paintballs. The local citizens are not trying to solve the problem of homelessness, locally or globally. They are acting in their self interest, attempting to preserve the good aspects of their city and prevent them from sliding down into vagrancy, filth, violence, and drugs. This is a broad, human, historical civilizational norm.

Austin, SF, and Seattle violate this norm. They attract vagrancy rather than repel it.

If you want to solve homelessness, start with one. Pick a project person, take them into your home, let their problems become your problems, and I believe you will understand the nature of the solution and be able to advocate for it more effectively.

Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?

That’s not the point of shooting paintballs at them. The point is to make them go away. To send the very clear message, “You are not welcome in this area. The next time you come to this area, something even worse will happen to you.”

My neighborhood has a very bad homeless problem. They have colonized several areas, setting up elaborate multi-tent encampments on residential sidewalks and next to businesses. Recently, one of them decided to set up his encampment - which included multiple shopping carts roped together - right in front of my apartment complex, with the carts blocking the footpath. I walked out and berated him, calling him a bum, telling him I’ll call the police on him, threatening to wreck his shopping carts and destroy the items inside, etc. None of this was designed to help him better himself, or to show him a path forward to reintegrate with society. It was intended only to dissuade him, in the strongest possible terms, from ever showing his face near this complex again. And sure enough, I haven’t seen him since. I did the same to a different bum whom I caught digging in our dumpster. Haven’t seen him since that day either.

As far as I can tell, very few of these long-term homeless have any chance of effectively reintegrating into normal society. Furthermore, I do not care if they do. I don’t concern myself with their wellbeing. My only concern is doing everything in my (very limited) power to get them as far away from me as possible.

I walked out and berated him, calling him a bum, telling him I’ll call the police on him, threatening to wreck his shopping carts and destroy the items inside, etc

I wish I had your fortitude, and I'd appreciate any member of my community who did the same.

My fear with doing something like that is it escalating into physical violence (I'm fit, but pretty short). Did you worry about it escalating? Best case scenario, I end up getting shanked and recovering for a week in the hospital. Worse case, I get killed. Worst case, I kill the homeless person and get my and my family's lives destroyed by my local government and media.

Oh god yes, I was internally terrified. This guy was a bit shorter than me (and I’m a short guy) but could almost certainly have kicked my ass if he’d decided to fight me. (I’ve never been in a fight and have no confidence in my capacity for interpersonal violence.) He was clearly an immigrant, presumably from Central America, and I wonder if fear of deportation was the main thing that caused him not to escalate things to a physical altercation. He got in my face at one point and made a vague physical threat, and that’s when I told him, “You just threatened me? Cool, that’s exactly what I needed in order to get the police involved.” He seemed to immediately regret it, and that’s when he started gathering his shit and preparing to leave.

I have gotten very close to getting beaten up by unstable homeless people, because I am too proud to passively accept their insults or let them colonize public spaces. If a time traveler from the future informed me that my cause of death will be “stabbed by homeless black guy at the trolley station following an avoidable verbal altercation” it would not surprise me in the least.

We raise our children to be compassionate and we look for spouses who are compassionate.

We raise our kids to lead with compassion in interpersonal settings where it is relatively easy to notice free-loaders (and for them to be punished for callousness as well). When dealing with freeloaders or people who not only can't participate in beneficial exchange but will actually punish you for trying, we tell them to stand up for themselves and not be gulls.

People get cut off all the time in interpersonal relationships (even the "pro-'Be Kind'" side is down with this). But they don't get to sue for human rights reasons to get back on the gravy train.

Many of us would find the sort of "compassion" suggested on a policy level that leads to defectors and the mentally ill corroding society absolutely asinine were it promoted to kids. It's not even acceptable when dealing with animals at the zoo.

We know a lot of people are not confused about this because "help your own, avoid freeloaders or impersonal systems that can create or incentivize freeloaders" is basic conservative ideology in America. Let's not even speak globally.

So is there an entirely different approach to beating back compassion when it comes to the homeless problem?

The problem isn't just compassion it seems. Eric Adams seems to want to change NY's position on right to shelter. But he can't do so unilaterally. He basically seems to be working to limit (or soft ban, if you're being a cynic) asylum seekers - another compassion case - but is also seemingly stymied by the political and legal situation.

How much of it is really legal and political barriers that favor those who can navigate such systems (and do have that version of "compassion")? If homeless people could be committed at will, it hardly matters what litigious bleeding hearts at some charity think. If the UK Home Office could simply summarily deport, it hardly matters that people protest. I suspect far more people - who consider themselves compassionate - are annoyed by the inability to just get rid of people, and are constantly given the runaround with the "it's the courts! Nothing we can do!"

To put it another way: I'm not sure that it's the general public that needs to be retrained here.

We know a lot of people are not confused about this because "help your own, avoid freeloaders or impersonal systems that can create or incentivize freeloaders" is basic conservative ideology in America. Let's not even speak globally.

Jonathan Haidt identified the group who bucks this trend as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic). It can feel like these people's values are dominant in the population if you live in a WEIRD enclave but as you mention, globally and even just in more conservative areas they really aren't, even if they are still able to hold an outsized amount of influence due to the concentration of mediatic, economic and political power in WEIRD enclaves. Haidt identified that WEIRD people tended to compress all moral judgement to the harm/care and cheating/fairness moral dimentions, wheras conservatives (and non WEIRDs) had a more multi-dimensional moral judgement.

I'm not sure that it's the general public that needs to be retrained here.

Depends on if you believe people ultimately deserve their government. Who's at fault for the fall of Afghanistan? Besides Biden and Obama, I think the conservative circles blame the Afghans. Ukrainians are (so far) willing to die to preserve their state and government, and Afghans aren't. Meanwhile Israel is willing to die to live, and the big question mark is what about Taiwan.

My point is, even if the courts are "technically" impeding deportation, it still goes back to the general public. The UK did Brexit, after all, so it can leave the ECHR, and Parliament can certainly seek to overrule its own high courts, and I think its recent legislation did basically dictate that courts define Rwanda as safe.

"it's the courts! Nothing we can do!"

There's an American version of this.

"We can't ban public camping, the courts ruled on this. Except of course when President Xi visits. Then we clear the streets."

Nothing about leaving the homeless on the street is compassion. Most of them belong in institutions or jail.

Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to commit people against their will, so it's going to end up being jail.

Unfortunately activist DA's have more or less decided not to enforce laws against even deadly violent hobos.

Instead they are left on the street to die, and occasionally take people down with them.

The status quo is already cruelty all around. Cruelty towards them, cruelty towards their victims future and present. The response depicted in the article is merely the last resort of self preservation.

And given that this is Montana, homeless people are at extreme risk of just freezing to death, I would think:

The part I struggle with is, how does a society argue against compassion?

This is the problem brought up in David Stove's What's Wrong with Benevolence? His answer to the title is: nothing, if it is combined with other virtues. The elevation of benevolence to the status of fundamental virtue, which began around the 18th century and which was accelerated by utilitarians.

What is required is the recognition that other virtues have a fundamental value, e.g. justice and prudence. This is not easy, even if the arguments are good, because most people are highly agreeable (in the Big Five sense) so they fear conflict, and they tend to see benevolence as a route to conflict-avoidance: "If only we are kind enough to the unhoused darlings, they won't cause any trouble to us."

It's the same dynamic with a lot of woke activism. Disagreeable radicals can bully around most people, because most people's default model for handling such conflicts is to bend the knee and hope it saves their own necks.

So elevating benevolence as the sole virtue has the persuasive power of elevating most people's submissive natures into approved virtues, and hence it has both philosophical arguments and self-interest in its favour. That's also why people's benevolence tends to extend to e.g. accepting misbehaviour by the homeless, but not Peter Singer-style austerity of living like a monk and donating all your income to the poor. Accepting abuse is much easier to market than undertaking privation.

Peter Singer-style austerity of living like a monk

ಠ_ಠ

Maybe "Peter-Singer-essay-style austerity", to ensure accurate phrasing just in case those allegations aren't all faked?

Accepting abuse is much easier to market than undertaking privation.

Is it? I'd argue that there's a popular "millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute" philosophy that points exactly the other way. Even if the first-order utilitarian analysis might judge a particular instance of abuse to be cheaper than privation, a second-order look at incentives suggests that rewarding abuse might merely engender more abuse.

I fear the real distinction here is that abuse of other people (the ones who can't afford to isolate themselves from crime) is easier for most people to accept than privation of themselves.

Although, in this analysis, "donating all your income to the poor" is deprivation that's also often tainted with various levels of abuse. The guy who takes your donations to buy food because some combination of his employer/family/government/health screwed him over is merely depriving you. The guy who takes your intended-for-food-and-shelter donations to buy intoxicants is abusing you. The guy who blew off high school and was then surprised to find that he can't get or hold a livable wage is in between.

Maybe "Peter-Singer-essay-style austerity", to ensure accurate phrasing just in case those allegations aren't all faked?

I was thinking specifically of his ideas about giving aid rather than his sex life, but yes.

I fear the real distinction here is that abuse of other people (the ones who can't afford to isolate themselves from crime) is easier for most people to accept than privation of themselves.

That's certainly easier, but people also seem willing to tolerate e.g. volunteering their pronouns when it's required for the job.

Although, in this analysis, "donating all your income to the poor" is deprivation that's also often tainted with various levels of abuse.

Depends on the poor people in question. Singer was thinking of starving children in the Third World, IIRC. However, as you say:

a second-order look at incentives suggests that rewarding abuse might merely engender more abuse.

Malthusian logic would suggest that the response of many of the Third World parents would be to have more children... At this step, serious benevolence-only types might start consider measures to encourage smaller families, such as "More education for women" or "More encouragement of contraception."

Malthusian logic would suggest that the response of many of the Third World parents would be to have more children... At this step, serious benevolence-only types might start consider...

Garrett Hardin was big on this. He thought standard charity to 3rd world countries was net negative. It merely lets them have more children and be further food insecure. If you want masses of starving people, give food to the poorest Africans.

I once tried to explain Garrett Hardin's point in a college anthropology class discussion and the TA became very mad. Her face frozen in anger glaring at me. Pointing out second order negative consequences doesn't make you thoughtful, it apparently makes you evil.

That was one of the formative experiences of my life watching that anthropology grad student lock up in anger because I said that dumping food on Africans whose agricultural capacity was decreasing due to desertification was actually a bad thing. Some large portion of Africa getting screwed by desertification was a major point of that class. So what happens when you send them food aid? One of my only failures to hide my contrarian nature in college.

Yes, one of the marks of bad social science (and other sciences, but it's particularly tempting in complex open systems) is not to ask the question, "And then what?"

I'll add one more explanation, beyond most people are highly agreeable: most people are lazy. Figuring out what is just and prudent takes more mental energy because it involves trade offs. It's way easier to assign a vague benevolence label onto some idea or policy. Hence, it's easy to be pro raising the minimum wage because it's benevolent! Takes way too much thinking to figure out the second order costs that make it unjust and imprudent.

An example of this is labels for legislation. The reason why they tend to have fuzzy "apple pie" names like "Inflation Reduction Act," "Patriot Act," "Social Justice Act" etc. is because a lot of voters will never think too far beyond the labels.

The Redpilling of the American public intellectual?

Being extremely online, using both X and Substacks and having used them for several years, I cannot not notice a process of redpilling of many US-opinion makers, both blue and grey tribe members.

Elon Musk and Marc Andressen are the first obvious examples, with both of them having directly followed and quoted members of the Dissident Rights (Andressen some days ago tagged Covfefe Anon in a post). Musk in particular speaks often with figures like Indian Bronson, Cremièux and Hanania, all of them supporters of the HBD and "liberal-racist" or "liberal-realist" (still fun that we are talking about an Indian, a Jew and a Palestinian).

Then we have the old New Atheism and IDW intellectuals gang like Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt and others. Their contribution to progressive criticism is not new, but from what I see on X, on the wake of the Harvard controversy, they are talking an harder turn. I cannot confirm because it is only an impression from who they interact with on X.

We have the "Silicon Valley Galaxy", the network of Musk-supporters based in California, with people like Mike Solana (another gay man) exorting the virtues of nationalism and communism-bashing on his wildly popular newsletter.

Nate Silver is a very fun example. A gay Jew who, in the last year, took an hard turn against progressivism because of Covid criticism and the purges that came from it, and now on his substack is attacking the left at every turn, attracting the very entertaining hate of the academic crowd on every post.

Also an individual like Noah Smith, while still completely faithful to the Neoliberal project, began to heavily criticize the progressives, saying that they are way more dangerous than the right.

I am sure that there are other names I forgot.

All of this to say that I see a change of opinion of public figures that, in the year 2016, would have been for sure allies of the Democrats against a Trumpian state. Obviously the change of opinion of twitter-based figures, online characters and academic eretics is not a change of opinion of the PMC at large, but for sure is more that the Dissident Right could have hoped for some years ago.

Noah Smith has been a figure so repellent ideologically to the right, and hostile to it, that I am actually curious about what he said.

So, there are figures that can be friendlier to the right. But as for some left wingers who are rather prejudiced towards right wing associated groups and see their rights as illegitimate, and identify more with groups associated with the left, and support mass migration and tend to see opposition to them as immoral it would be a repeated mistake from the past to put too many hopes on them.

The generally reasonable dissident right figure Auron Macyntire is correct about liberals. That a subset of them when other progressives are unwelcoming, or they disagree on their pet issues like say Israel, they turn to the right but they don't think they have done anything wrong. They want to run the right in accordance to their own values while looking down on right wingers. And of course they start gatekeeping and deplatforming actual right wingers and preferring people like them.

Similarly we get heterodox academies of Jonathan Haidt whining about intolerance of heterodoxy, while their organization and groups are made almost exclusively by liberals. Or forums like motte, which as far as I am aware, all moderators are liberals, but is supposed to be a neutral forum, and the ideology of those who moderate is unrepresentative of the posters.

We also see these figures try to do the same with "centrism" and define themselves as the only moderates and centrists and everyone who disagrees with them as an extremist. Even though in practice their social views, or views on immigration, or on how much they sympathize with various identity groups are far left. Even if some other progressive extremists are further left than them. If you don't define what is centrist by the last couple of years, and by what leftists who run media define as centrist and moderate and what they define as far right. Any longer term outlook realizes that actually the dissident right, part of what they are pushing were more pervasive and dominant in the past, and we have had a radicalization in the recent past. It would be a welcome development for that to be corrected. Moreover, we should also care about how some trends in politics that have been in influence for a couple of decades have evolved today, and their observable effects.

Elon Musk and Mark Andersen although not dissident rightists do seem to have been influenced more so, or share an agreement with several issues promoted by the dissident right that are valid.

In general, I like the more moderate figures of the actual right, and dissident right like Auron Macyntire, while for the general faction, I think they are pushing in the right direction and society is too lopsided in a left wing and antiwhite direction, but I don't agree with the ends that some dissident rightists wish but have a more moderate preference. Meaning if the more extreme dissident rightists were the dominant part of society I would dislike them, however I do find the more moderate figures to be more moderate than the liberals and Ben Shapiro types too. And that the liberals are the dominant faction makes it quite wrongheaded to not prioritise them. As for the neocons, there isn't really that substantial difference with many liberals and the sweet spot of where to be on such issues is not attained by neocons. Not by a long shot.

I do think I have been influenced too by some of the figures of the dissident right and their views, and seeing that they got things correct.

But I was also influenced by the past religious right now, in a way I wasn't in the past. Frankly, it was mainly the liberals as a group, and their key politicians and political organizations and how far they have pushed and how that they behaved that played that role. And when talking about liberals a key part of the issue are how beholden and key part of it are various identitarian extreme lobbies of the progressive stack alliance of intersectional identities.

The right wingers who have been warning and being cautious and were defamed as being uncharitable, and unfair, were in fact correct. Part of that correctness relates to the skepticism towards liberals/progressives who are willing to sometimes criticize progressives. Of which even Obama has done so, in his quote about how the world is messy, but this doesn't change that Obama's influence lies after and before such statements. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774918215/obama-says-democrats-dont-always-need-to-be-politically-woke

As president he helped push things in the woke direction. He certainly is supportive of the even more extreme Biden administration. And quite recently played a key role in a film with antiwhite racist rhetoric. https://www.foxnews.com/media/obama-produces-first-fiction-movie-netflix-gave-extensive-notes-director-cyberattack-plot

Biden's and that general faction's extreme policies, of open borders, of authoritarian persecution of political opposition, on purging non woke, or following the progressive supremacist party line, are in fact alienating people. For that to count as winning, we should have to see a lot more than that and policy changes as a result of opposing faction/coalition exercising power. And of course, we shouldn't actually care too much about people who are part of Biden's faction but make some limited criticisms. It would be detrimental actually, in that it disincentivize caring about an actual opposition. The right has had a lot more rhetoric about winning, when it hasn't been winning, while the left pretending they are the underdogs, where they aren't, hasn't been detrimental to them. So, we should be realistic.

Or forums like motte, which as far as I am aware, all moderators are liberals, but is supposed to be a neutral forum, and the ideology of those who moderate is unrepresentative of the posters.

How do you know this? Can you accurately describe my ideology, let alone that of the other mods, and how do you know what the modal Motte poster's ideology is?

All moderators are definitely not liberals, but I'm always curious how those of you who think we're only enforcing the rules in favor of our ideology think a "neutral" forum should be run. (Sometimes the answer is basically "Don't mod at all except when people post actually illegal things," but that would be an entirely different kind of place from what most people here want.)

If you don't want to be called the L-word you must turn in the janitor badge. Anyone based enough to have cool opinions would never consider the job of internet moderator.

You misunderstand. I, personally, will still own to being a "liberal" (though obviously I'm a heterodox one). But we frequently get told that all of us are liberals, and that is not the case (and was not the case even before @FCfromSSC joined the team).

These comments are legitimately hilarious. I welcome my new status as boring, moderate and milquetoast.

"mod"erate

That a subset of them when other progressives are unwelcoming they turn to the right but they don't think they have done anything wrong.

I've spent about 60 seconds on this sentence and I'm still not sure I understand. For clarity, do all 3 theys refer to the same group, that subset of liberals?

Yes, the liberals who turn to the right don't think they have done anything wrong. I also mean by saying other progressives that the dinstinction between liberals and progressives as a tribe is false, and there is in fact enormous crossover.

Part of the advantage of liberals as a tribe, is this false sentiment of neutrality, of moderation, of centrism, when they are creatures of the left in reality.

Part of the advantage of liberals as a tribe, is this false sentiment of neutrality, of moderation, of centrism, when they are creatures of the left in reality.

I'm probably first and foremost a classical liberal, extremely libertarian, with sympathies to anarchocapitalism. I oppose nearly all progressives in some form, though they're not necessarily wrong about everything. Mainly to the extent they want to intrude upon or eradicate classical liberalism.

As a young teenager, I had a vague notion of progress, from barbaric wars to slavery to racism to the color blind attitude I embraced wholly in the 1990s. Clinton was cool, Bush and Reagan were evil empire.

But I had a libertarian history teacher who was great with insights and making conceptual connections, and read some Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman before college. Then Rothbard, Hayek, Mises. Then 9/11 happened and I moved rightward in a couple dimensions.

Am I the exception that proves the rule? Or a creature of the left?

All this to say, it's an interesting idea, but I don't buy the conclusion. I think liberalism is a concept prior to left/right, and while the left/right spectrum is useful, it fails to illuminate the nature of liberalism.

Or forums like motte, which as far as I am aware, all moderators are liberal

I'm certainly not a liberal of any variety.

Wait, you are a moderator too?

Among the new individuals, I noticed netstack, selfmadehuman and another individual which is liberal. I would have to update then. So at this point what is the ratio of non liberals, to liberals? Are you comfortable being so outnumbered, that the process has been fair and balanced?

Naraburns is another case that is a little interesting as he opposes liberals on some issues but self identifies IIRC as liberal, and supports mass migration for western countries while opposing it for Israel. Is there also anyone who opposes zionism among the moderators and sympathizes more with the Palestinians than Israel?

I wouldn't say you aren't a liberal on ethnicity however. My impression is that you seem to oppose ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them, but oppose the liberal tribe for supporting doing this for their own preferred groups. So you are more consistent than them on that, but still take an ideologically more left wing perspective. Even if the actual left, especially the modern left has as key part of its dna applying it inconsistently.

Of course, my own perspective that it is legitimate for ethnic groups to identify with their own group (well not always, immigrants should be in limited numbers and identify more with the interests of the natives than if they lived in their own separate homeland), and to pursue their well being and legitimate interests and rights but do so in a manner that is reciprocoal with the legitimate rights of others. Which is affected by others behavior of course. To be fair this perspective also has existed among parts of the historical left, being a pervasive perspective in general. But the left wing faction that opposes this, and especially opposes it in a motte and bailey manner against their ethnic outgroups has been the most influential in pushing things in its direction. Plus my perspective has also existed and exists even more so outside the left.

I wouldn't say you aren't a liberal on ethnicity however. My impression is that you seem to oppose ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them, but oppose the liberal tribe for supporting it. So you are more consistent than them on that, but still take an ideologically more left wing perspective.

If I understand you correctly, your claim is that:

  1. Progressives support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume, specifically minorities.
  2. Liberals oppose 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them'
  3. Inferring from the fact that you don't think FC is 'right-wing' on this issue but rather liberal, true conservatives/'right-wing' people also support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume for white people?

Is this accurate, or would you like to correct my interpretation?

Liberals as a tribe has the issue of playing a motte and bailey between opposing ethnic nationalism in general and calling identifying with it as racist, and also actually do support tribalism for their own favorite groups. They also do this for sexes. They see the nationalism for their preferred groups such as blacks, Jews, Palestinian as legitimate, while they inconsistently promote the ideology against nationalism. This inconsistency doesn't change who pushes the motte.

To take a position that is anti-ethnic identity is still in line with a left wing tradition and ideology. Whether promoted by communists, marxists, and others. The left has also promoted this ideology against any other collective identities than those defined by the left, or doesn't prioritise what they care about. The collectivism of individualism ideal, is a left wing ideal, not a centrist ideal and not a right wing ideal.

But even that part of the left had those who made a different evaluation of oppressor ethnic groups and oppressed and that related to how the left evolved.

Even if one pushes consistently an opposition of ethnic, religious, group identity, this is in fact a left wing ideology. Even if the left/liberals as a faction are in fact as a majority, and as their pervasive perspective not consistent.

Inferring from the fact that you don't think FC is 'right-wing' on this issue but rather liberal, true conservatives/'right-wing' people also support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume for white people?

Supporting ethnic nationalism only for white people as legitimate, I would consider as extreme far right. Not of course equally extreme, or even necessarily extreme for someone to prioritize white rights and be a white advocate.

In general, for any groups I do think too intense activism should be assumed to be typically immoral if your group has been getting substantial victories in favor of it at expense of others.

While to oppose nationalism only for white people should count as the extreme far left. No matter how many people who identify with this want to frame their perspective as moderation. Which unfortunately, even I rhetorically understate sometimes, due to its pervasiveness among current liberalism/leftism. As well as the fact that you can get in trouble if you are too blunt. An extreme faction becoming more influential does not change its characteristics. The USSR as an example was not a country run by moderates when the Bolshevics were the only game in town. We need to actually evaluate whether the perspective is lopsided in one, or another direction.

It is both moderate and right wing to think that white people have legitimate ethnic communities too. But in terms of identification, it tends to attract people who identify more as right wingers in certain countries. But is in fact the moderate position.

If we have to rate things on a slider from oikophobic to overly nationalist, a perspective that tolerates ethnic communities is not a controversial perspective. And also when it is inclusive of Europeans too.

It is those parts of the left I mentioned that have had a strong objection to that while others compromised with them when they went along. And of course, there are also people who oppose what I argue and oppose rights for their right wing ethnic outgroup from an explicitly ethnonationalist perspective who know they are being machiavelian about it, or actually fit more with the right in their own country.

But such populations can still support the left when abroad.

This shows the limitations of the political spectrum when it comes to nationalism, since someone's ethnonationalism for their own country which fits more with the right there, can be more compatible with the left in the context of foreign politics.

Thanks for taking the time to explain.

It is both moderate and right wing to think that white people have legitimate ethnic communities too. But in terms of identification, it tends to attract people who identify more as right wingers in certain countries. But is in fact the moderate position.

What, concretely, do you mean when you say white people have legitimate ethnic communities? As in, there are physical communities in the USA that should be able to exclude non-whites? Or even non-physical communities/cultural...events, or what-have-you that are necessarily white rather than race-blind mainstream American?

To lay some cards on the table, what you're arguing seems to be that most conservatives are some flavor of white nationalist. I assume at the mild end of the spectrum you describe, this is less blood and soil rhetoric and more 'it's okay that my tabletop game club is made up entirely of white men' or 'the president should be white as the USA is a majoritarian white country.'

While to oppose nationalism only for white people should count as the extreme far left. No matter how many people who identify with this want to frame their perspective as moderation.

I just don't think it is true that progressives or liberals oppose nationalism specifically for white people. Japan may be a fargroup for progressives in the US and as such doesn't receive much attention, but I've certainly heard people express discomfort at their attitude towards foreigners/non-Japanese and a national identity built on race. Any kind of nationalism built on race makes progressives and liberals deeply uncomfortable.

Furthermore, I don't believe that conservatives writ large support carveouts and national-identity/community building based on race. Perhaps I'm typical minding, perhaps my mental model is wrong and you're right - I'd honestly encourage you to tighten up your argument to something more concise and write a top-level post to see what people think so we can get more data.

If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race, would you agree with progressives that call them white nationalists? And your argument is simply that being a white nationalist isn't a bad thing, because to you progressives are black/asian/hispanic nationalists?

What, concretely, do you mean when you say white people have legitimate ethnic communities? As in, there are physical communities in the USA that should be able to exclude non-whites? Or even non-physical communities/cultural...events, or what-have-you that are necessarily white rather than race-blind mainstream American?

That there should be white organizations representing whites interests. That, in the USA non explicitly white organisations and people not representing whites in particular, should see the white American ethnic community as a core group, which is interests are legitimate and important part of what they ought to represent.

Outside the USA that should also be the case.

That the idea that this is evil should be taboo and treated as racist. The hysteric reactions and cancel culture on the issue should simply not exist. There also should be more intolerance for antiwhite ideology, including of this type.

That extremely antiwhite ngos should stop be tolerated to remain as pervasive as they are. How this ends up being done can be lead to discussion, or your imagination.

In general both the white and non white organizations and general organisations representing the interests of any groups should not be as extreme as say the ADL is today.

That race replacement in media depictions should stop.

That immigration should be opposed openly on the basis that it replaces white people (and also others like blacks). I also think white Americans in particular are key part of the historical american nation, and this should be recognised. That there should be an attempt to raise birth rates of historical American nation, and others of historical USA,so they don't become extinct in their own country. Also mass deportations of illegal migrants.

Frankly, as a country that has had already plenty of migration the identity of historical nation and the identity of newcomers is hard to create a common ground.

This isn't antithetical to in addition to the ethnic identity that there would also be a common American identity. But it can not be expected to be an one sided affair and would require non whites to respect whites, as well as white progressives to respect their own ethnic community.

This idea that tribal identity is an obstacle to a common identity but only for a particualr people is bankrupt. The USA is already a multiethnic country that promotes that the cohesive whole is part of multiethnic.

I generally have stronger views for european countries, which is not necessarily unrelated to not being American. Agency problems are real with nations. However part of it is that for most of them most mass migration is very recent and much of it from illegal migrants. I am not the man of all solutions of everything that must be done in the exact detail but I can certainly tell in a broad level that whites as a legitimate category of ethnicities rather than being designated by amnesty international as non indigenous is the more moral path.

Maybe some of the details of how far that entails can be debated. But it is definitely the case that targeting them to deny them such rights is a very destructive path.

What organizations like amnesty international are doing claiming that europeans are uniquely not indingeneous people is an agenda that leads to genocide, meaning extinction. It leads also to mistreatment and people becoming hated minorities in their own countries, while the foreign population boasts of conquering them.

If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race, would you agree with progressives that call them white nationalists? And your argument is simply that being a white nationalist isn't a bad thing, because to you progressives are black/asian/hispanic nationalists?

Since you have been asking questions and asking if it is fair for progressives to be calling others as white nationalists, let me ask my question in the same manner.

Do you think that progressives who have massive double standards and might in fact support making minorities or even the extinction of white people, are not racist? Couldn't such agenda be accurately labeled as anti-white racist supremacy?

Is someone who either supports or tolerates the existence hateful identitarian organizations, and mainstream organizations that promote the same agenda and large double standards and stigmatizes whites in particular, not in fact nationalist to an extreme degree for various progressive identity groups?

If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race

It is not the case that conservatives will choose race to be what nation and community is based upon. Ethnic communities that see their group as legitimate to pursue their interests in their favor are already treated as a core part of the USA. Race is already what ethnic communities are based upon, and are treated already as a legitimate basis of American identity. Especially non white groups. Hell, in a schizophrenic manner this applies to a very limited extend for white identity, since it is both allowed and not allowed. Both a group, but also it is bad for it to be a group. And it was the basis of white American identity even more so in the past. America is already a nation that understands it self as separated and comprised of different ethnic communities based on race. It is just the main one is not allowed the same rights and treatment than the other ones.

If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race, would you agree with progressives that call them white nationalists? And your argument is simply that being a white nationalist isn't a bad thing, because to you progressives are black/asian/hispanic nationalists?

Absolutely not. I think progressives calling others white nationalists as pejorative towards any legitimate white ethnic identity should be treated as an example of them engaging in extremist racism and this behavior ought not be tolerated. It is an uncharitable conduct that stigmatizes white ethnic groups in particular and their advocates.

It is a slur as it is used, so it shouldn't be tolerated.

If the term is used in sufficient number in a non charged and abusive context, then it might become more legitimate. But it is bad conduct to be used in this manner.

This framing of white nationalism can justify destroying all european countries/people. So if someone opposes it and think their people shouldn't go extinct and shouldn't become a minority in their own homeland they are just called a white nationalist under an one sided culture of critique.

When actually it is the more moderate position, and was more so before the progressive's fait accompli due to mass migration happening. Although for european countries it is easier still for most because most mass migration is recent and less rooted. Some like Denmark have been succeeding in paying them to leave, as well as cutting. But of course the Danish had been ruled by moderate nationalist variety of parties, including a social democratic one. Describing them as such is less charged than calling it white nationalism. The connotations more accurately fit what the Danish are and did.

White nationalism as a term has been poisoned too much by abuse and hateful intolerance towards the legitimate human rights of white ethnic groups to allow progressives, or others who use it as a pejorative to throw the term around to characterize others who support the human rights of Europeans.

Moreover, I don't actually support limitless nationalism. Nationalism as a movement can results in excess, while opposition of nationalism and intolerance of said nation as a movement results in excess against said nation. Nationalist movements can be extreme or associated with it. White nationalism is especially uniquely stigmatized with extremism and it is also why it would be erroneous to label it as white nationalism because the connotation is that promotes an idea of a world of rights for whites only which isn't what I am advocating for. This isn't to say that all people who do self identify with the term are white supremacists in the way the later is associated with white nationalism.

The reality is large % of people support their continuing existence as a people, and this has been even more so in the past. And applies even more in European countries. These people tend to also not like fascism. The associations that the term white naitonalism has been used to be associated with and their ideology are different.

Nobody is calling anybody to implement the full agenda of the most extremist weakman you can find.

Fundamentally, I would rather different nation states which are homelands of their ethnic groups continue to exist, and have a perspective that see it as justice to oppose the destruction of even foreign nation states. Ideologically, I am pushing for treating as legitimate the interests of your own group. For you to prioritize your own group. But also to treat other groups same interests as legitimate.

This also applies in the case of the family unit. People should prioritise the interests of their own direct family and work for their well being and prosperity. Nothing unjust of ist for doing that, even if the family also has been under attack. Which also entails property rights to be respected and not allowing everyone into your home. Good fences make for good neighbors. Simultaneously they should recognize the same rights of others and try to seek their own prosperity not by acting like the mafia stereotype of destroying others in a predatory manner.

Many europeans do think on the way I frame things, against their extinction as a group.

American conservative base oppose the great replacement and are part way there in the way I advocate but have been influenced in part by the cancel culture on the white issue. There is still a substantial difference between much of the conservative establishment which doesn't oppose it, actual conservative base that does, and progressive/liberal movement that supports the anti white agenda, including replacing their white outgroup. It is also true that American conservatives who are pro white are less racist than progressives in terms of how much they respect different group rights. The agenda to replace and discriminate white people is the racist pervasive agenda of our time. While opposing this is the moderate option.

Progressives in the broad sense should stop throwing names around towards those rightfully opposing their extreme destructive double standards and be self critical of the extremism of their own position. In fact in terms of how much bias they have for their preferred groups and against their white outgroups, their position is the destructive and extremist one, if we compare and contrast.

Since you have been asking questions and asking if it is fair for progressives to be calling others as white nationalists, let me ask my question in the same manner.

Brother, you can ask me all the questions you want. Generally I don't volunteer my opinions that often as they rub people the wrong way, but if you're polite I'll probably answer anything.

Do you think that progressives who have massive double standards and might in fact support making minorities or even the extinction of white people, are not racist? Couldn't such agenda be accurately labeled as anti-white racist supremacy?

I don't believe that progressives are calling for white genocide. You can probably find some people on twitter making jokes about how they hope all white people die in a fire, which I frown upon, but I don't think it's the same thing. Assuming you mean something along the lines of demographic trends and immigration meaning that white people will be a minority in America at some point this century, I don't believe it's an explicit agenda a la Great Replacement Theory. I agree that some people would cheer at those trends which I also find distasteful.

The phrase 'anti-white racist supremacy' doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But sure, if you come up with some other negative term to describe people cheering on white people dying or being outbred then I would likely agree with using said term.

Is someone who either supports or tolerates the existence hateful identitarian organizations, and mainstream organizations that promote the same agenda and large double standards and stigmatizes whites in particular, not in fact nationalist to an extreme degree for various progressive identity groups

No, I don't think they are 'Black nationalist' in a meaningful way. As far as I'm aware, the vast majority are not advocating for an exclusive 'Black America' based on race, they are advocating for equality of outcomes in (what they see as) a biased system. I also would dispute the language you use to describe them, although without examples (beyond the ADL) it's difficult for me to say.

But yes, I would denounce someone who supported the black equivalent of the KKK or stormfront.

Absolutely not. I think progressives calling others white nationalists as pejorative towards any legitimate white ethnic identity should be treated as an example of them engaging in extremist racism and this behavior ought not be tolerated. It is an uncharitable conduct that stigmatizes white ethnic groups in particular and their advocates.

The word 'faggot' was a pejorative for a long time, until it was reclaimed. Whether progressives consider it a pejorative is orthogonal to the actual definition of the word and whether you think it accurately describes the worldview you're describing. If you think 'white nationalism' doesn't accurately describe your views, then what view would constitute white nationalism and what would you call your views instead? But I assume you do agree with the accuracy and just object to the fact that most people think white nationalism is a bad thing based on:

If the term is used in sufficient number in a non charged and abusive context, then it might become more legitimate. But it is bad conduct to be used in this manner.

I had always been skeptical when progressives called conservatives and the MAGA crowd white nationalists, but here you are, espousing views that I think broad, bipartisan swathes of America would call white nationalist. I suspect that the vast majority of American conservatives disagree with your worldview, and in the old place, when this topic was discussed, the defense was invariably that 'no, conservatives don't actually believe those things.'

This framing of white nationalism can justify destroying all european countries/people. So if someone opposes it and think their people shouldn't go extinct and shouldn't become a minority in their own homeland they are just called a white nationalist under an one sided culture of critique.

I disagree with the base assumptions of this statement on multiple levels, as well as most of the rest of your post, but this is already getting too long for both of us.

More comments

To lay some cards on the table, what you're arguing seems to be that most conservatives are some flavor of white nationalist. I assume at the mild end of the spectrum you describe, this is less blood and soil rhetoric and more 'it's okay that my tabletop game club is made up entirely of white men’

I am possibly misunderstanding you here, but it sounds like you are saying you would consider “it’s okay that my tabletop game club is made up entirely of white men” to be a mild form of white nationalism. If so, and if that is the standard liberal view, the inferential gap between liberals and conservatives on this subject is frankly too large to overcome. No conservative I know would have the slightest problem with an all-white group of friends hanging out; they wouldn’t consider it racist, wouldn’t consider it an example of white nationalism, and would most likely think of anyone who disagrees as the genuine racist.

As far as I can understand, he would call that the moderate position, no?

It is both moderate and right wing to think that white people have legitimate ethnic communities too. But in terms of identification, it tends to attract people who identify more as right wingers in certain countries. But is in fact the moderate position.

I'm assuming that tabletop community would be a 'legitimate ethnic community.' But even that is fraught - if it's recognized as a 'legitimate white ethnic community' and a black person wants to join, what happens? If you just happen to have a board game group that happens to be all white I think progressives would ding you on not being inclusive enough but not call you a white nationalist, if you happen to have a white ethnic board game group that would actively exclude others based on race, then I think you deserve the label of either racist or white nationalist, no?

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Among the new individuals, I noticed netstack, selfmadehuman and another individual which is liberal.

I'm a liberal? That's news to me!

On political compass quizzes, for what it's worth, I am dead center. In terms of self identification, I call myself a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies, and that is very much not what just "liberal" means these days, sadly.

Let us be liberal in our dispensation of charity and tolerance for typos.

In that case, given that this forum is supposedly a single principled libertarian (me) and a zillion witches, you are at the very least not lonely haha.

The neighborhood children fear to ring my doorbell too, because as any good libertarian should, I offer them drugs at free market prices.

Maybe the fact that the drugs in question are vaccines might have something to do with it, but that's neither here nor there.

In that whole post a decent amount of space was taken by me articulating how left wing certain conceptions of centrism have been. A key part of left wing propaganda, especially starting in the 90s with Tony Blair and even the Clintons was to pretend to be centrist while being radical in a left wing direction. This conception of centrism and moderation is a falsity. It doesn't represent being at all in the middle on the most important issues. Nor even having a centrist position in how one treats different identity groups. Nor even on how one responds on problems.

For example, if ones response to massive fertility crisis is to not give a shit, and to worry about not going too far with social conservatism, that isn't a centrist position. Maintaining an ideology of very limited criticism the left wing social revolutions is what actual in real life leftists I know do. Easy to get several of them to say how they oppose feminazis but a toned down feminism is good actually and so on, and so forth.

As I said:

The generally reasonable dissident right figure Auron Macyntire is correct about liberals. That a subset of them when other progressives are unwelcoming, or they disagree on their pet issues like say Israel, they turn to the right but they don't think they have done anything wrong. They want to run the right in accordance to their own values while looking down on right wingers. And of course they start gatekeeping and deplatforming actual right wingers and preferring people like them.

and

We also see these figures try to do the same with "centrism" and define themselves as the only moderates and centrists and everyone who disagrees with them as an extremist. Even though in practice their social views, or views on immigration, or on how much they sympathize with various identity groups are far left. Even if some other progressive extremists are further left than them. If you don't define what is centrist by the last couple of years, and by what leftists who run media define as centrist and moderate and what they define as far right. Any longer term outlook realizes that actually the dissident right, part of what they are pushing were more pervasive and dominant in the past, and we have had a radicalization in the recent past. It would be a welcome development for that to be corrected. Moreover, we should also care about how some trends in politics that have been in influence for a couple of decades have evolved today, and their observable effects.

If you are a centrist, then that leaves little room for actual centrists.

Maybe I should have had a line or two about how these people who present themselves as centrists tend to also often try to reprsent themselves as anti woke liberals.

The point articulated is that your differences with other leftists aren't sufficiently important on some very important issues! That there is still isn't enough representation of a different perspective than that. It was right there in the post, so you should have respected that. Unless you try to censor this view and in an authoritarian manner try to impose the view to accept your claims of "centrism" even though you claim to be a type of liberal.

The liberal agenda is to support replacing western nations and treating them as illegitimate. This is a far left ideology. One that the disagreement against is either the dominant view of right wing base, or as in various european countries is the dominant view of the people of the country.

If different varieties of cultural marxist ideology is pervasive in certain circles, those who belong in groups that show such groupthink should admit that there is an echochamber problem when criticised on those grounds.

You support mass migration and you go along with that. Say you will be voting the Democrats which are extremely far left on culture/identity. Dehumanized Palestinians and supported their destruction which isn't really classical liberalism nor shows any real libertarian tendency. Neocons are however firmly a part of the liberal tribe. Part of modern liberalism is this machiavelianism.

In actuality the ADL type of progressive who is a Jewish supremacist, is one of the ways to be a progressive and the more establishment friendly type in the USA. You align close enough to that, even if you don't go as far as people like Jonathan Greenblat. Although considering your willingness to support extreme violence against the Palestinians, we shouldn't take at face value any claim of you respecting rights or freedoms. Just like you do that on the basis of your view of Jewish superiority, an ideology of Jewish superiority over white working class, can lead to someone like you articulating taking more of their rights, or hate speech laws.

In terms of ideology, classical liberalism didn't exist in the way modern leftists say it does. Historically supposedly classical liberal societies had laws against indecency, and were societies that tried to balance promoting a moral order, conservative and pro religious norms, obviously nationalism of some kind is a key aspect of any society that is made by a people with some liberal mores and political liberalism.

Hell, many of the people using that term classical liberal aren't even classical liberal in the term of willing to tolerate and support institutions showing genuine neutrality, and promoting equality under the law. They are unwilling to support the removal of say civil rights act. They tend to be simply leftists who want a limited hangout to aspects of the most recent far leftism and are unwilling to dismantle the current system which is one which acts as a hateful foreign conqueror in that:

It discriminates against a people. It spreads propaganda that defames them while elevating other ethnic groups and their grievances. Resentful Indian grievances are part of this It treats their rights are illegitimate. It renames their heritage, their monuments, their schools. It removes them from their own history, and in both present and past replace them.

To be fair, at some point the dinstiction between leftism or neoconservative is hard to define. Since people like you, who fit more under the neocon label both have far to the left views and are part of this but also tend to combine some views that are more associated with extreme far right. Someone who defines himself as a liberal and calls for the replacement of the white working class such as Bret Stephens still tried to promote HBD in New York Times. A certain racial supremacist ideology, can be compatible with supporting a left wing globalist empire, if one doesn't buy into the false notion that such people are consistent anti-racists. Resentful people who hate others and like their favorite groups have been a key part of the left wing project.

The reality is that there is enormous crossover between progressive, neocon, liberal, and you fit mostly in the neocon category. It misleads rather than provides understanding to see a hard distinction between these. It rather creates irrelevant debates between people who aren't sufficiently different and manufactures consent to a cohesive ideology that is shared by promoting a very limited overton window.

It is a fiction and grossly misleading to buy into you being a classical liberal.

It is true that you have some differences with other progressives, but these tend to be either a limited hangout, or a case of you aligning more with one faction of progressive far left extremism and helping them perpetuate their code switch propaganda of presenting themselves as moderate, as a means of isolating that type of the left and controlling it, while also controlling the opposition to it. We also see people who are extremely racist in favor of Jews and destructive against non Jewish ethnic groups to try to define moderation to be about having this racist ideology. In general the ADL it self and others who do have this ideology often pretended to support freedom of speech but weren't honest about it. Why should I take someone who supports such extreme destruction of an ethnic group of Palestinians because of your sympathies of the Jews, as someone who will at all oppose anything directed against other groups that Jewish supremacists hate?

On some of the most important by far issues, there is group think dominating. And it seems to be the case with zionism as well. The reality is that when you try to shut down and don't encompass at all any reasonable views associated (in a media landscape dominated by left wing extremists) with the far right, you have this group think.

And if you try to incorporate into your liberal ideology the idea of the supremacy of the Jews and that colonialism can be good, this neocon ideology is fully in line of a global left wing american empire and much of progressivism. By incorporating into it fucked up unreasonable aspects of far right ideology in this manner, you actually aren't acting inconsistent with the history of leftism. Which did share elements of extremism with non leftists, including extreme nationalism for their favorite groups while selling extreme antinationalism for their disfavored. So this was in a left wing direction.

It represents one faction of it in fact. For it is also a mistake to pretend that the ADL faction represents "liberals" while the faction that is more hostile to Israel and see Jews as also white oppressors, represent "progressives". It is substantially the same ideology with a different who/whom. In your case, you seem to be even more of an HBDer and yes less far to the left than ADL, but not sufficiently so for your representation to break the group thing, rather than reinforce it.

To conclude, as i said in my original post for the general phenomenon, not just on motte differences exist, but not sufficiently so for there not to be exist a dominant strain of liberal ideology. There is one who does have a different ideology that breaks from this. Any space that has a mixture of neocons, progressives, supposed libertarians who seem libertarian on the outside and neocon on the inside where push comes to shove (to contrast with a Ron Paul type of libertarian which is a more right wing type), do not show sufficient dissent to the globalist american empire ideology and of the liberal consensus. Especially if people fit more with a specific subgroup of said liberal faction.

Since there has been an attempt by left wingers after expelling right wingers from institutions and discriminating from them, to define their views as moderation, this is also something to be recognized here. A general culture of being too prideful about any dissent from the left has also developed. Either one sides with this attempt to deceive the public and buys into a false view of the world, or takes both a more long term outlook and an outlook that focuses on actually examining how far someone aligns with or against various groups, or positions. It isn't just a definition game. Conservative parties when liberals got control of them, while treated by people of different varieties of liberal as moderates, have in fact promoted far left policies. The most typical example of this are the British Torries after Cameron, but the template continues to be followed in other cases. Recently in Poland we have seen predictable authoritarianism. Moderation is not something that can be trusted, but we have observed the opposite. That repeated observation tells us what to expect instead. And what a faction ends up doing and behaving like, and even some of their rhetoric, tells us more accurately what they are about than how they sometimes frame themselves in a more moderate direction.

The very existence of any alternative that is moderate or gasp right wing, requires accurately understanding reality and how much of a commonality and extremism there is among different shades of liberals.

I don't really care enough about what you wish to call me to really unwrap the tangled knot of your reasons to think that vastly different classes of people who consider each other mortal enemies are all plausibly lumped in together as liberal, even if I think it's stupid. We're not even talking about Stalinists vs Trotskyists here.

In your case, you seem to be even more of an HBDer and yes less far to the left than ADL, but not sufficiently so for your representation to break the group thing, rather than reinforce it.

Really? What exactly is the criteria for when advocacy for HBD makes someone "break the group thing". If I join 4chan in their advocacy for "Total Nigger Death"?

If I float, I'm a liberal. If I sink, I'm a liberal, and apparently I need to hit the bottom of the pond at terminal velocity for it to count in your eyes.

Resentful people who hate others and like their favorite groups have been a key part of the left wing project.

People can and do have very different reasons for "hate". America and Russia hated Nazi Germany for rather different reasons.

We also see people who are extremely racist in favor of Jews and destructive against non Jewish ethnic groups to try to define moderation to be about having this racist ideology.

Is this somehow relevant to the moderation of this forum? I am unsure if it is, or if you're speaking more broadly.

As I've said on record, I like the Jews in Israel or at least much prefer them to the Palestinians or the rest of the Middle East. I am less positive on the Jews in the US, who are a very sizable number, because they self-sabotage and raised the leopards that are eating their faces.

Why should I take someone who supports such extreme destruction of an ethnic group of Palestinians because of your sympathies of the Jews, as someone who will at all oppose anything directed against other groups that Jewish supremacists hate?

The relevant reason for why I dislike Arabs is not because they're "anti-Jew". It is because they are backward religious fanatics who can't even point to having achieved anything of importance that wasn't off the back of their luck in having liquid gold beneath their sands.

And "non-Jewish" ethnic groups comprise uh, 99% of the rest of the world? You'll find I am very neutral to them.

Who else are they supposed to hate? The Romans? Christian Evangelists? Black Israelites?

It rather creates irrelevant debates between people who aren't sufficiently different and manufactures consent to a cohesive ideology that is shared by promoting a very limited overton window.

We have a very wide Overton Window here, with everyone from open pedophiles to those who want to shoot them, Jew-Defenders to Palestinian supporters, and everything in between.

As far as I can see, you prefer to lump everyone to the left of you, or even directions entirely orthogonal to the right, as "liberals", or carrying-water for them. All well and good, you're welcome to your opinion, even if I think it is entirely absurd to class me as a lib.

Naraburns is another case that is a little interesting as he opposes liberals on some issues but self identifies IIRC as liberal, and supports mass migration for western countries while opposing it for Israel. Is there also anyone who opposes zionism among the moderators and sympathizes more with the Palestinians than Israel?

Er... I'm "liberal" in the classical sense, most Americans would not identify me as "a liberal" but maybe sometimes as "a libertarian." Even then I am a little too comfortable with government action for the tastes of partisan Libertarians. My progressive friends tend to think I'm too conservative and my conservative friends tend to think I'm too progressive so I don't think it would be wrong to call me a centrist, even though nobody ever does. Maybe it would be better to call me a "skeptic."

Like @Amadan I don't remember making any statements regarding mass migration specifically, in Israel or anywhere else. Even the political philosopher John Rawls (who was liberal and probably also "a liberal") believed that nations possessed qualified rights of exclusion (though I don't know if he ever elaborated on the qualifications). As a classical liberal I am skeptical of the wisdom of ethnostates, but I also see examples in history where soft ethnic cleansing seemed essential for long term peace (e.g. Greece/Turkey) and also where mass migration has collapsed empires. I conclude that I should therefore be neither "for" nor "against" mass migration, but merely open to understanding its likely impact in specific cases.

HoffMeister probably would have become a mod if he’d wanted the job and amadan certainly isn’t a liberal. In fact none of the mods seem conventionally progressive to me.

They don't even seem "liberal", in the American sense of the word.

Naraburns is another case that is a little interesting as he opposes liberals on some issues but self identifies IIRC as liberal, and supports mass migration for western countries while opposing it for Israel. Is there also anyone who opposes zionism among the moderators and sympathizes more with the Palestinians than Israel?

I won't speak for @naraburns but I do not recall him ever self-identifying as a liberal and I don't recall any such statements by him about mass migration. Maybe I missed something. That also wouldn't describe my position, though. Even though I do self-identify as a liberal.

Your litmus tests are pretty silly. Moderators aren't selected according to how we align on various issues. If you really wanted to run a poll, we'd probably fall at various places on the spectrum regarding "Zionism" and the Palestinians (personally, I don't give a shit about "Zionism" and I have little sympathy for either Israelis or Palestinians as a people, though I always have sympathy for civilians suffering war and other atrocities), but I mistrust your definitions. You wrote a lengthy rant below about "far leftists" but ironically, for being a complaint about the impossibility of centrism, I cannot see where you would allow for the existence of a genuine liberal who is not a "far leftist."

The moderator team is small enough that ratios of views barely matter.

1 vs 3 just feels very different from 100 vs 300.

Zorba is also still ultimate dictator. He is happy with where things are so you don't notice him. If he was not happy you'd probably notice.

Hlynka was a mod at one point, probably the farthest "right" that any moderator on this forum has been. I think hlynka would call your ethnic thinking leftist. He was always a very controversial mod. I think the controversy was more because of his personality than his opinions.

We routinely have to mod posters that we agree with, for saying things in a way that breaks the rules. Some mods find this difficult. I find it easy, because I don't like seeing my positions ineptly defended. So don't be too quick to think that viewpoint alignment with a moderator is always going to help your case. Hlynka most often butted heads with other right wingers.

Wait, you are a moderator too?

For better or worse, it has indeed come to that.

I wouldn't say you aren't a liberal on ethnicity however. My impression is that you seem to oppose ethnic identifications, but oppose the liberal tribe for supporting it.

I'm willing to live in peace with people who are willing to live in peace with me. I don't think ethnic conflict is necessary or inevitable, and I'm willing to make sacrifices and accept losses to try to keep the peace. I think a considerable portion of Blacks problems are cultural, since we have records of them having better outcomes in the past. I think racial essentialism is stupid, and the strong version of HBD at least is foolish and destructive. I also do not believe that white Progressives' ethnicity makes them somehow less my enemy.

On the other hand, I think that it's okay to be white, and that the general liberal consensus on race has completely failed on its own terms, and that what remains of it is held together by active deceit. I'm not optimistic that any of the problems facing blacks can realistically be solved in the foreseeable future, and I'm militantly opposed to my tribe accepting blame for them. I think white flight and economic gating are reasonable responses to the dysfunction of the black underclass. I oppose mass immigration, and generally think that the proper response to mass-importation of voters is to reject and dissolve federal authority.

Make of that what you will.

I am more interested in ethnicity than race. Which is in fact related to ethnicity, but the later is a more exclusive category. When a race is attacked in an immoral manner to be oppressed or destroyed as a group it makes sense, not only for them, but righteous in general to oppose this attack.

I do think white as a primary ethnic identity is completely legitimate for white Americans and I find the whole taboo to be remarkably irrational. For other white people, their primary ethnic group is different. Although even for white americans, it also comes with specific ethnic characteristics along. Especially historically.

To begin with, the ethnic identity of white groups of which their race is an aspect of their ethnicity is legitimate. But when white is the ethnic groupping used for the group, then it becomes also a legitimate category as the primary ethnic category. I always think about this question, that whatever ethnic group anyone is primarily called as, is inherently a legitimate category for them to identify with as an ethnic community.

This isn't racial essentialism, and does not require HBD which is true, to be accurate. I am not a racial essentialist if you define it to mean race is everything. I oppose mass migration of foreigners of the same race. I also would object to all white people trying to identify primarily with the general whiteness as a primary ethnic category, over seeing their white identity as a general category they have in common, because this would undermine and dissolve their particular ethnic characteristics. But it makes sense to unite against being attacked as a group on that basis, without dissolving their particular ethnic distinction.

Race is quasi ethnic, and an aspect of ethnic identity. And in multiracial societies tends to become the ethnic identity. And some groups like blacks, can be said to have a very strong sense of black identity in their diaspora in the west that it is in fact their primary ethnic identity in comparison to the european natives.

I also oppose people using HBD to justify destroying foreign ethnic groups. HBD should be an add up to how people view the world, not the primary lens. Ideally it can be used as a weapon to oppose bad policy and to accurately understand the world. Mostly, I see it as helping reinforce opposing things that are bad on other merits and I would oppose anyway such as mass migration and affirmative action policies, and blaming disparities on racism.

I also do not believe that white Progressives' ethnicity makes them somehow less my enemy.

But are white progressives genuinely white ethnically in the same way?

Moreover, USA can not be said to be a free country that allows its white ethnic group the rights to identify with its own community and have representation, when in fact there is a totalitarian system of persecution, blacklisting and character assassination.

Personally as a non American I am interested in how the same logic is used against ethnic groups in European countries and elsewhere too. The logic of America is used to lead to the destruction of european countries as well.

There are various historical episodes of a people under a foreign occupation that mistreated their own where a percentage of their own people supported the regime.

Cultural marxism has the nature of behaving and following the logic of foreign conquest and siding with foreign nationalism at expense of its own people.

Therefore, like those other historical situations of groups that have identified more with a foreign tribe, despite by ancestry and even customs often belonging to a different group, their position ethnically is more complex than to say they are clearly on your own side.

Moreover, if you actually investigate the rhetoric of people who are further right than you, and have a view in favor of white identity, many of them are willing to treat white progressives as enemies.

White progressives tend to think they are white but that white identity is illegitimate and evil. So they aren't clearly not white ethnically either. It isn't as if their perspective invalidates white identity because nobody identifies with it, it is more that they consider it illegitimate, while still being their group. This fits with the framework of parts of an ethnic group oppressing their own while siding with foreign ethnic groups. And of course some progressives that might be called white, might identify primarily as a different ethnicity and hostile to those who identify as white, because they see them as a threat to their ethnic identity. Which should be more clearly excluded from the white ethnicity category. While say someone like Amy Wax, clearly thinks that the white category in general are her people.

I don't actually object to you seeing blacks as also Americans and defining your country as not just a country for whites. Although, the current type of multiethnic USA is a massive compromise and a result of mass migration. Which is a huge problem to how to define a country based on a historical people and where other groups existed but tended to be excluded, but then was subject to mass migration. Without said mass migration it would be easier to define it as mainly made of a particular people but multiethnic too.

On the other hand, I think that it's okay to be white, and that the general liberal consensus on race has completely failed on its own terms, and that what remains of it is held together by active deceit. I'm not optimistic that any of the problems facing blacks can realistically be solved in the foreseeable future, and I'm militantly opposed to my tribe accepting blame for them. I think white flight and economic gating are reasonable responses to the dysfunction of the black underclass. I oppose mass immigration, and generally think that the proper response to mass-importation of voters is to reject and dissolve federal authority.

Well, it is fair to say that you do differ on a lot of issues with liberals.

Can you clarify what you mean that it is ok to be white? Would you ban NAACP, ADL and similar organizations if you were in charge? Would you stop the one sided taboo by allowing white identity groups to operate on the same basis as others? Would you enforce a taboo against racial ethnic community for blacks, or Hispanics?

But are white progressives genuinely white ethnically in the same way?

So blond and blue eyed lifelong Democratic voter who hates Trump and despises the flyover rednecks, who never fired a gun and would rather die than be seen driving a pickup truck is not "white". So "whiteness", as you see it, does not have any correspondence with actual skin color.

Then, why call your ethnic identity "white"? If it is not only about skin color, but about values and beliefs, then what would you do when large part of "white" people actively reject these values and beliefs?

Just drop the race thing completely and say: We are ancient Redneck nation, we want end of our oppression and persecution, we want freedom for our occupied Redneck lands, we want our national self determination.

There are various historical episodes of a people under a foreign occupation that mistreated their own where a percentage of their own people supported the regime.

There are even more historical episodes when "nation" wanted to force into ranks of "their people" masses who had zero interest to be part of this club. Just one example, like you claim to speak for all "whites" Russian nationalists always claimed to speak for all Slavs, even when these Slavs strongly disagreed. Hadn't ended well.

This is a strawman, although I edited my post so maybe you missed part of it.

The basis of white ethnic identity is race. But is not sufficient. I said that the white progressive both is on some sense white ethnically, and in another not.

If they are against white ethnic identity as illegitimate, their behavior is not the same as the kind of people that fit more clearly to an ethnic identity.

If they are progressive otherwise but not against white as a legitimate ethnic category, this doesn't apply.

A common ethnic consciousness tends to be an important characteristic for an ethnic community. And foreign nationalities trying to oppress an ethnic group try to undermine and not allow them to have such common ethnic consciousness but to submit to their supremacy.

The typical white (American) progressive sees themselves as white but also thinks it is a bad thing for whites to identify with their own community, nor sees it as legitimate. This counts as a betrayal and oppressive hostility. This type of self hatred and self denial, does change how such person should be identified as.

There are even more historical episodes when "nation" wanted to force into ranks of "their people" masses who had zero interest to be part of this club. Just one example, like you claim to speak for all "whites" Russian nationalists always claimed to speak for all Slavs, even when these Slavs strongly disagreed. Hadn't ended well.

This is a gross misrepresentation. I didn't call to unite whites under my leadership, or ethnic group. Quite different. I even called against this. The slavic analogue would be to allow slavs to have their own ethnic communities. Not to be dominated by the Russians uniting all Slavs. Which I approve different slavic nations. I think even Yugoslavia was a bad idea and indicative of the problems of multi-ethnic constructs. I do think that people of different ethnicities but a broader civilizational or even racial category should unite in opposing being attacked unfairly as a group however. For example if some group is trying to destroy all Slavs, then all Slavs (and not just Slavs) should especially unite to oppose this.

Opposing your mistreatment is not dangerous, it is the reversal of reality. Not opposing it is dangerous and immoral.

It is in fact the progressive side that tries to force whites to not exist, and supports what will bring their nonexistence to reality through mass migration and ethnic and racial replacement, and through making their ethnic communities taboo and persecuting those who dissent. Which has in fact not only its own ugly history of persecution, but also goes more along with the modern example of Russia trying to dominate the Slavs. Not tolerating the existence of ethnic communities you dislike in their own homeland and supporting those who side with foreign conquerors is also more compatible with the bad behavior of the worst regimes seen as far right.

You are reversing the situation when it is progressives who deny representation of the interests of white Americans.

Do I respect people who aren't gang ho about their nation oppressing others? Sure.

Do I respect self hating ideology and supporting your own people's oppression and destruction? Not at all. It is a dangerous and extreme ideology that isn't respectable. But that only necessitates a lack of self hatred and extremism against whites. You can still oppose plenty of things in a manner that would be respectable, like one ethnic group of whites trying to dominate the rest, or whites colonizing the rest of the world.

If you want to play the "choice" card, progressives and others should remove their persecution first.

But in any case, a group that already exists is inherently a legitimate ethnic community. The idea that it is evil to identify with your own ethnic group and it's well being if that group is a white ethnic group in general, or in particular, is an immoral racist idea. Especially in a country that treats ethnic categories for other groups, including racial groups as perfectly legitimate. Including by conservatives.

Just drop the race thing completely and say: We are ancient Redneck nation, we want end of our oppression and persecution, we want freedom for our occupied Redneck lands, we want our national self determination.

I am not aware of the redneck nation being the primary group category that white Americans are called by. In fact, they are called whites constantly, both for condemnation, and in neutral identification. And in positive terms by white Americans. It is also how they are discriminated against in policy, in a systematic manner.

Part of the reason that their collective identity is delegitimized is divide and conquer, incidentally. Directly related to hateful rhetoric and policy at their expense to discriminate and replace them. As a certain rabbi said without antiwhite menace (unironically, I don't have a particular problem with him) in a video, there is a reason why hollywood targets whites but not Jews, blacks, etc. It is because the whites don't have their anti defamation leauge, and other organizations advocating against negative potrayals.

So in your perspective, while whites should be a redneck nation in particular and blacks, hispanics, Jews, Asians and others can be a seperate entirely category that is allowed. Which is what expressing selective outrage means.

How about, no. Your prejudices of targeting particularly white Americans is not a fair demand that should be listened to. It is in fact a racist demand.

Actually, I might eventually make a post in the future about why the ideology of liberals and liberalism, and the general cultural marxist framework is completely unsuitable for multi-ethnic societies. Their ideology is of course destructive for homogeneous societies too and part of that leads to them becoming more multiethnic. But for multiethnic societies, it is difficult as it is to keep the balance and different ethnic groups from dissolving things and from conflict.

But what they do once they have transformed societies into multiethnic? They don't try to keep the peace, and ethnic conflict at bay by promoting (which will come with some authoritarianism) some mutual respect among groups. They pick the native formerly majority group to treat as illegitimate while treating the foreign groups as legitimate while promoting arguements about how the native group's nationalism is such a threat. And do this both directly and by just one sidedly promoting criticism towards their ethnic outgroup and its identity.

This is not how you run any multiethnic society if your goal is to avoid conflict and respect the different groups that comprise of it.

It does relate to a strategy within multiethnic societies to avoid conflict eventually by one group dominating and destroying the others. Which is obviously very destructive and will cause conflict. But even if that goal is achieved then the other groups of the progressive alliance will find their own alliance that is about uniting towards a common outgroup more difficult to handle. Moreover, such societies wouldn't had become multiethnic without the progressives policies.

So why not the left to promote "intersectionality" but actually have a room for white Americans, Christians, or men? It wouldn't be the ideology of intersectionality any more, but it would work based on principle of seeking compromise based on different identity groups. Of course then there is also a question in regards to numbers, and there are still huge things up to debate.

In certain ways itself would be a massive compromise when considering American history.

But what has happened here which is the progressive side and those who conformed, to promote both the demographic replacement of their outgroup, and to treat it as completely illegitimate, while also treating their side as the anti-racist one is just remarkably extreme.

The true blue progressives- not their moderate hangers on, not the liberals, but the hardcore DSA people- are like actually crazy. That’s been apparent for a while now, but what changed was 1) it became apparent that their actually-crazy ideas have real world consequences 2) the general public doesn’t consistently distinguish moderate from hardcore progressives 3) hardcore progressives won’t moderate. Now could I have told you that soft-on-crime DA’s were a terrible idea? Yes. I could have. But it seems like the mainstream liberal consensus was legitimately that it would blow over before there were any serious consequences.

Gaza is probably the other elephant in the room. Whether you support Israel or not they’re patently not carrying out a genocide, support for Israel is a high-salience issue dividing the hardcore progressives from everyone else, and shenanigans like blocking highways are a pretty big deal that they’ve been allowed to get away with for a while on other issues.

Whether you support Israel or not they’re patently not carrying out a genocide

Israel definitely wants to genocide Gaza and the West Bank

That's an obvious lie, neither Israel (as an official policy goes) wants it nor it's doing it. With overwhelming power superiority Israel has, if they wanted to massacre a million people in Gaza, or West Bank, that would have already happened. There's literally nothing that could prevent Israel from doing that, militarily. But Israel does not want to do it, and didn't.

And please, spare me out-of-context quotes from early 90-s where some Israeli politician said something like "I'd be happy if all Palestinians went to hell". It's not policy, and if you think it has anything to do with the official policy, you are not qualified to have any opinion on any Middle East policy at all.

With overwhelming power superiority Israel has, if they wanted to massacre a million people in Gaza, or West Bank, that would have already happened.

Israel isn't going full auschwitz solely, by what I can see, because of goy morality and power. Without that all non-Jews would be either killed or cleansed into outside borders - whichever is more pragmatic. Any honest assessment of sympathy for goy/Palestinian civilian life in the greater Jewish/Israeli public results in basically nothing. They want these people gone and have zero interest in cohabitation. But even with Jewish subversion of the American government, a hostile USA and/or "West" would be an apocalyptic disaster. So PR still matters. Getting the South Africa treatment alone (even though they are objectively worse) would be catastrophic. If they only had nuclear arms alone to make an argument against Turkey curb stomping them, or even worse, a total unified middle east, it could be all over. Right now is a balancing game in how far they can go without critical consequences, with a heavy experimental lean towards killing as many men, women, and children as possible, while maximizing destabilization.

Now personally, I find the word "genocide" tiresome. It's overly political (in a bad way) and basically amounts to a modern version of what excommunication was in the middle ages. With all the subsequent pointless theology and dishonest motivated reasoning that comes with such.

That said, if we call the Armenian Genocide a genocide I don't see what is so different about Gaza. Only time and, again, the morality/power of the non-Jewish side of the USA is preventing it from even greater realization of the logical conclusion of their deliberate actions. Will they take responisbitly for a food/disease crisis they have created? Will they allow the rebuilding of hospitals? And if they drag their feet to x degree exactly how many statistical deaths will that result in? Time, and power politics within the USA will tell.

Please be proactive when making an inflammatory claim. That means providing stronger evidence.

with a heavy experimental lean towards killing as many men, women, and children as possible

Except Israel hasn’t been doing that- their civilian deaths have been a lot more like the USA’s than Russia’s.

Israel isn't going full auschwitz solely

That's a libelous statement by itself - Israel is not going not only "full auschwitz", but neither 1% or 0.001% of it. There are no camps designed for massacring any Arab population, there are no official program of eliminating Arab population, there is nothing of the sort. There is a war, truly, and a war among dense built area where the other side doesn't bother with conventional things like uniforms or military identification (a war crime by itself, but Hamas is committing every war crime in a book, none excluded, so of course they do this too) and using schools, mosques and hospitals as military outposts - of course it will bring some casualities, and given that, as I mentioned, the only figures are coming from Hamas, and they don't bother with formalities, everybody except senior leaders which are officially known as Hamas are called "civilians". Hamas membership is not exclusive - it's like being a communist. You can be a doctor and a communist, a journalist and a communist, a truck driver and a communist. Only with Hamas, you can be a doctor in the morning and keep Israeli hostages in the evening. You can be a "journalist" in the morning and a drone operator in the afternoon. You can be a farmer and one of you farms would host rocket launchers shelling Ashdod and Tel-Aviv. That's all "civilian" population and that's what the IDF is dealing with now.

Any honest assessment of sympathy for goy/Palestinian civilian life in the greater Jewish/Israeli public results in basically nothing.

If by "honest" you mean "completely false and libelous". Nothing can be further from the truth - a lot of people in Israeli society are bothered with Palestinians, and presenting Jews as some kind of genetics-obsessed community that treats everybody with wrong genes below animals (there's an active animal rights community in Israel too) is an utter bullshit. The level of blood libel bullshit. You obviously know absolutely nothing about Israeli society and what the dominating opinions there are. Yes, Israel population supports war with Hamas. No, nobody in Israel talks in the terms you are implying.

That said, if we call the Armenian Genocide a genocide I don't see what is so different about Gaza.

Everything. Armenians did not attack Turks and did not gruesomely rape and murder thousands of them, Hamas did. Turks did put as their goal destroying Armenian population, Israel does not. Pretty much every aspect of what is happening in Gaza, bar none, is different.

But even with Jewish subversion of the American government

Oh, you are one of those people....Basically, everything you ascribe to the evil Jews, you'd see in a mirror - it's you who are obsessed with racist genetics and view everything through the lens of the ethnic conflict. And of course, you are possessed with irrational, but flaming hate of Jews. I am sorry I just noticed it now. I am done spending time on you.

Their goal is to get all Palestinians to leave to other countries they have no interest in a 2 state solution (settlements etc) and are trying to displace them in their own territories. Israel is a genocidal project by definition the only reason they haven't genocided them is because they can't.

That is an obvious lie, Israel spent a lot of effort, lives and diplomacy to implement a separation solution. There would be absolutely no reason to do all that - from Oslo agreement to Gaza evacuation to creating Palestinian Authority to other measures - if Israel indeed wanted to eliminate Palestinian presence. All these measures - which constitute Israeli policies for three decades now - are completely contrary to that goal. You basically ignoring everything that actually happened in service of your insane hatred.

Israel is a genocidal project by definition

The definition of Israel is a state of Jewish people. There's absolutely nothing "genocidal" in it, you lie again.

I have no doubt that the right Israeli election cycle could deliver a government that would just slaughter the Palestinians if they thought they could get away with it. Really I won’t even dispute that the likud under Netanyahu would if he thought he could get away with it, exterminate the Palestinians.

But the fact of the matter is they can’t get away with it, they’re not doing it, and they’re not about to do it. Even the ‘deport all the Gazans to Congo’(as if Congo needed more violent savages) isn’t genocide, except possibly on whatever unfortunates they side against in Congo.

They could send them to Uganda so we could come full circle.

For such an obviously contentious and inflammatory claim, you really need to provide more argument than simply asserting it.

Whether you support Israel or not they’re patently not carrying out a genocide

Funny, when I first read this I misread it as "they're patently carrying out a genocide" and I was very surprised to see someone expressing an opinion like that here. I only noticed my mistake now.

Is it surprising? The only thing that would stop me from openly expressing an opinion like that is that I actually have to go there for professional reasons sometimes (and even more so to its occasionally protective big brother), and I would like to not leave anything on my digital record that could be caught by a very crude crawler after some unlucky accident correlating me to my Motte account and cause me problems at the border.

(Being catchable by a more sophisticated crawler is less concerning because at that point so many people would get caught that a "reject them all" policy may not be sustainable.)

The true blue progressives- not their moderate hangers on, not the liberals, but the hardcore DSA people- are like actually crazy.

This is hyperbole about your outgroup; DSA ideology might be mistaken or even disastrous, but I don't think you're arguing that it's a mental illness, so claiming it's "like actually crazy" just adds heat without light. I get the general thrust of your argument and think it's valuable, but so is keeping things civil. Turn it down a notch. ...Checking your record, I see a pretty even mix of AAQCs and warnings. My advice would be to put a bit more thought into how you come across to your opposites in the future.

There is the entire milieu of alt-middle/center online. Musk, Andreessen, Pinker, etc. have been critics of the left for a long time. Pinker especially. But there are new entrants like @cremieuxrecueil , @wil_da_beast630, and @eyeslasho who espouse HBD and gained popularity after being boosted by Musk. This has always been a good niche because you get almost the entirety of the right-wing audience, plus some on the left and middle, but with less risk of being cancelled or de-platformed. Noah and Matt Yglesias, although part of the left, are effective liaisons between the center-right and the centrist/center-left, and are outspoken critics of the far-left. And then there is someone like @RichardHanania who found huge success with an anti-populist, pro-hbd message, which was an underserved niche and the opposite of the economic populism of trumpism that otherwise dominates online.

Between covid bankrupting hard-left claims about uplifting the poor and promoting civil liberties, and the racism of the antisemites bankrupting hard-left claims of opposing racism, I think I have a good understanding of why these intellectuals should, and are, switching sides. It's basically the same reason I did, just much later (for the former, I figured that out in 2020, not 2022. For the latter, Corbyn already revealed this among UK progressives in 2015-2019). I would be most interested in hearing a steelman over why these intellectuals should not switch sides. Has anyone attempted that, or are articles responding to them all just tribalism?

Thing is, they can't make a clean break. There are only two coalitions, and they're going to stick with the left one come hell or high water. Even if it disowns them. And they and their followers will always vote for the Democrat.

And they and their followers will always vote for the Democrat.

Yes, but what that means is changeable. I know the "democrats were the party of slavery" line is a little played out, but they were. And a fairly big shift happened within the party without the party ever having a clean break.

The parties in the US are more like coalitions elsewhere, the coalition building just happens before the election rather than after, as would happen in a parliamentary system. There's a ton of factionalism inside them. Democrats holding these views aren't useless to one who isn't a democrat. It means, eventually, democrats with those views running for office. And, at worst, a whole bunch of extra in-fighting happening before things that non-democrats don't like being voted on.

If you're not a progressive democrat, you should probably like what you've described. Control of a few senators and representatives is probably what's going to prevent really strong legislation you don't like from passing next time the democrats have the trifecta.

Musk in particular speaks often with figures like Indian Bronson, Cremièux and Hanania, all of them supporters of the HBD and "liberal-racist" or "liberal-realist" (still fun that we are talking about an Indian, a Jew and a Palestinian).

In general, Indians, disregarding our general societal conservatism, are very much "race realists".

Hell, someone asked me if I'm an alt for Indian Bronson. Which I am not, for the record.

The only reason this isn't particularly obvious is that there are very few other "races" in India, it's mostly Indians of different ethnicities with the odd African student going to college.

But that stance does carry over when we move to the West, Indians can have quite negative opinions of other races, especially blacks, though the liberalised UMC 2nd gens have that covered up their integration into the Social Justice memeplex. Certainly in the women raised that way, less so the men.

My relatives in the UK always told me to keep an eye out for congregations of black youths, and to keep my phone in my pocket if I spotted them.

We do however, have sincere appreciation for the local Whites, and other "Model Minorities" like the Asians, even if Hispanics are a bit iffy they're not unbearably so.

The only reason this isn't particularly obvious is that there are very few other "races" in India, it's mostly Indians of different ethnicities with the odd African student going to college.

I thought it was due to the scheduled caste/affirmative action in India being so very strong that the majority of Indians who end up in the West have a bone to pick with the concept of it.

A disproportionate number of immigrants to the West (especially the US) are upper caste, so that's certainly one of the reasons they're unhappy with things, let alone when they find out that being (South) Asian means they're going to be discriminated against again in the States, when it comes to education at least (and woe upon anyone who comes between an Indian and his kid's education).

But Indians, in India, are quite prone to casual racism, especially against Blacks, East Asians, or the North-Eastern citizens of India who look more Nepali/Bhutanese/Thai than they do what you typically think of as "Indian". I will note that by "racist" I mean muttered comments, crude comparisons or questionable/insensitive wording. Africans or African-Americans get the worst of it, though the Indians in the US are usually savvy enough to keep their opinions shared solely within their cliques.

Honestly from having a close friend/old housemate who's very high caste Indian back in the motherland (Father a very high ranking Air Force figure, grandfather owned a ton of stuff), it was always hilarious listening to complaints about bias or stratified society in context of what their family had gotten up to.

As I've said before, I'm not upper class. In fact my descent from my father's side makes me just above the cutoff for explicit AA as extended to the lower castes.

If that has ever advantaged me, I haven't noticed, and it has glaringly disadvantaged me when it came to the AA quotas for higher education, it's at something ridiculous like 66% now, maybe 80%.

Hell, I didn't even know my caste till a biology teacher asked me in high school, because she wanted to pray at a temple for her students and that was somehow relevant. Some on /r/India would claim that's a sign of privilege, but fuck them.

It might be different in the military, which still is a bit of an Old Boy's club, but in general India is quite meritocratic. I am modestly confident that the success of the upper castes stems more from HBD reasons than the system being stacked in their favor, whereas it explicitly is for the lower ones and they're still not closing the gap.

The outcome of the chaos of the 70s and the 80s liberalization under Reagan, Thatcher etc was that the PMC essentially established a happy ‘equilibrium’ of free markets, higher-than-before inequality, well paid white collar jobs, cheap blue collar labor, high levels of outsourcing and offshoring for non-credentialed labor, cheap borrowing and rising asset prices (benefiting above all homeowners and those with equity portfolios).

The problem is that a lot of ‘woke’ does directly destabilize that lifestyle. The cities into which the PMC poured as crime rates fell in the 90s become once again dangerous and high-crime shitholes, extreme DEI stuff threatens them at work, the mob’s demands eventually become less and less easy to placate. Most dangerously of all, the era of comfortable political ‘moderates’ who do nothing to upset the status quo too much appears likely to draw to a close, presaging an unpalatable choice between far left (economic defeat) and far right (cultural defeat).

Far better, in such an environment, to make a few concessions. Of course, some would say that was Moldbug’s game all along.

I don't see how woke meaningfully threatens that equilibrium. More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials. Cheap blue collar labour from mass immigration. To the extent that they have a position on the issue, they seem to not mind firing up the money printers and not doing anything to counter it with interest rates, so cheap borrowing and rising asset prices.

More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials.

This only kicks the can down the road, though. Whites can squeeze out one extra generation of PMC jobbing by jobbing specifically as agitators for their own replacement, but when their children come up against a hiring agent thoroughly steeped in the parents' propaganda, there'll be no cushy jobs for John Jr.

their children

Well, they’re below replacement rate on that, too. Something about their parents poisoning the well for the future and then peace-ing out is their standard excuse for not doing so; assuming they’re correct about that, well, apple didn’t fall far from the tree in those cases.

The cities into which the PMC poured

From where? The suburbs? Small towns? Are you referring to all the normally childless hipsters and other white PMC who usually move into gentrifying urban areas?

The real question imo is whether the "centrists" will vote for the GOP or if they will still continue to give the progressives they disagree with more power. I'd be a bit surprised if any of them aside from Musk ended up doing so.

It's a question of threat assessment. You can either give the DSA-types more power, or you can give creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly ant-meritocratic racists power.

It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging. In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists. Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair has been pretty condemnatory.

Trying to make the same check on the right for strict abortion restrictions, someone like Stephen Miller being put in charge of immigration policy, etc does not present a compelling case to to change your vote. You can even make a very unflattering comparison by just reading this forum for a bit and seeing how much support explicitly anti-meritocratic and anti-individualistic racism has in even the more intellectual part of the right.

What's wrong with giving creationists more power? Defending evolution does not seem to be very popular. The top post is about American public intellectual slightly adjusting toward 'HBD' which is in essence the belief that human evolution does not stop at the neck. The Dr Watson position:

he's "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours--whereas all the testing says not really." He went on, reports the newspaper, to say that "people who have to deal with black employees find...it is not true" that all humans are equal.

Another popular one from a previously resigned Harvard President :

"even small differences in the standard deviation [between genders] will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out [from the mean]". Summers referenced research that implied differences between the standard deviations of males and females in the top 5% of twelfth graders under various tests. He then went on to argue that, if this research were to be accepted, then "whatever the set of attributes ... that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley ... are probably different in their standard deviations as well".

Which political movement is defending these science-based, evolution-grounded positions?

Not to mention the contemporary dualist belief that some people's souls get mismatched to the wrong body and hormones. Nobody ever explains who creates these souls and how this works from an evolutionary point-of-view, but this is apparently the Science.

What's wrong with giving creationists more power?

That we are in 2024, not 2004 and this Dubya era cause of teaching creation science/intelligent design is as defeated as any political cause can be? Read wish lists of most radical conservative wishful thinking, you will not find there any notice of this thing.

And as for BAP - he is troll and shitposter, who does not have any actual political demands and proposals here and now (what could these be? compulsory fitness training to make the nation more muscular? this would be massively unpopular, most of all among the conservative base).

Real reason why even moderate centrist people who hate wokeness and DSA types and who would appreciate less immigrants and more law and order balk at voting R is, outside of raw classist disgust of rednecks and their unsightly pickup trucks, in most of the cases, abortion. They fear giving right-to-lifers-from-conception even morsel of more power.

That we are in 2024, not 2004 and this Dubya era cause of teaching creation science/intelligent design is as defeated as any political cause can be?

Well we were talking about hypothetically picking between 'DSA and creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly anti-meritocratic racists'.

I don't see racists as anti-meritocratic, as per the top post, modern racist intellectuals are a pretty diverse bunch :

Indian Bronson, Cremièux and Hanania, all of them supporters of the HBD and "liberal-racist" or "liberal-realist" (still fun that we are talking about an Indian, a Jew and a Palestinian).

Whoever can hack it will find a spot in the racist coalition, no matter where they come from.

abortion. They fear giving right-to-lifers-from-conception even morsel of more power.

Why is killing their own child so central to some people's life? Especially funny in light of recent events. Whether we're talking about beheaded babies or bombed hospitals, a thousand voices will raise in indignation and condemnation. Not to mention the hysteria around people that dared to expose others to their breath.

But the mere suggestion that perhaps one should avoid certain practices instead of murdering their own child. Beyond the pale.

You can either give the DSA-types more power, or you can give creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly ant-meritocratic racists power.

What about HBD liberals? There are a lot of people somewhere in between Scott Alexander, Steven Pinker, Charles Murray, (much closer to the edge) Steve Sailer, etc. Or like Cremieux. The first three aren't at all anti-meritocratic racists. You could argue (but it's a bit tortured, and there are deeper causes for far-right growth imo) that the wokes disempowering people like that enables the far-right to grow.

It's very clear siding with the DSA types is more damaging. Precisely because they control most of the power already. The mainstream left has been ignoring the blatant anti-semitism on their side for years because they pretend Zionist makes it all better. As if the GOP would proudly stand by the KKK if the KKK just said they wanted to kill all negroes rather than black people. Trump got party-wide condemnation for having Kanye in his house compared to Dems not even being able to condemn the squad. To say nothing of them championing the rot of higher education because it provides "experts" who they can use to push their authoritarianism ever further. You'll note Claudine Gay was not fired. She was defended by every power structure in academia even after she resigned. Putting somebody like Stephen Miller in charge of immigration means the entrenched bureaucracy might get some pushback in the other direction finally. And considering the anti-merit/anti-individual Right has 0 power, compared to the same on the Left which is in place nearly everywhere and backed by the power of the law, I absolutely would say it is safer to side the the Right there even if I don't agree with them.

It's very clear siding with the DSA types is more damaging. Precisely because they control most of the power already

This is an interesting consideration. However, I think it presupposes that the badness caused by extremists on the left is somehow balanced and counteracted by badness caused by extremists on the right.

I think it's more accurate that the badness on both sides is orthogonal so this sort of "we need to push the unbalanced scales the other way" logic doesn't quite apply. The example of free speech seems instructive: there was a general perception around here that the left having too much power caused a lot of unjustified censorship of the usual topics. However, while shifting power towards the right did sort of fix this, this was only at the cost of even more extreme censorship of completely different topics (evolution, gay relationships, etc.)

Unfortunately, one side's extremists aren't going to save you from the other's---the only way out is to get both sides to police theirs effectively.

Uh, there hasn’t been censorship of evolution or gay relationships.

Something about 'Ron's book ban'.

This morning I read an article about a Florida school district removing some dictionaries because they included definitions on the word 'gay'. Wether you think this is a sincere attempt to avoid litigation or an insincere stunt, I leave to the audience.

It's a question of threat assessment. You can either give the DSA-types more power, or you can give creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly ant-meritocratic racists power.

It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging.

I agree it's not at all clear, but I also think it's quite clear that the side with the DSA-types is already the much bigger threat, because that's the side that has proven to be willing and capable of using metaphorical ICBMs, while the BAP-side seems to be struggling with understanding what wooden spears are. I think both would do bad things if given the power, and the latter is far worse than the former, but we'd need to give quite a bit more power to the latter before the it became a threat approaching the former.

It took decades for Left Inc to finally 'police its own' and issue denunciations when some of them unapologetically stated they had no issue with the externination of Jews - despite this strain of antisemitism being loud and obvious to anybody paying attention and who wasn't wrapped up in the coalition. And this just so happens to coincide with wealthy donors shutting their purses. Sure.

Ditto for the insistence that elite higher education was essentually unassailable, had no duty to accountability or obligation to explain itself to the plebs, and only caved when the extent of Ms Gay's fraudulence became too much to ignore - after bravely standing to her defense with a super-serious official Harvard letter and several weeks of articles accusing her critics of being anti-black.

Compared to the reflexive denunciation ritual every Republican or conservative has to partake in when somebody points to a Nazi and accusingly asks "DO YOU HAVE A COMMENT ON THIS?". Nope. You don't get to casually claim superiority on that front. Perhaps you are saddened that you see less of those denunciations 'over the last 8 years' than before, but it's obvious to me that this fruit doesn't have much juice left to squeeze, and that is entirely your fault.

EDIT: I don't know how I could have written that bit on Claudine Gay and completely whiff on the most odious part of her case: that her fraudulence went uninvestigated, unpunished, and was generally rewarded due to political interests in an institution that is supposed to value academic excellence (ha ha, I know, at least 'on paper'). Gay isnt a bad actor operating all on her own. She gets to her position with the aid of a corrupt system that will crow about their prestige and integrity every day of the year, right before they pivot to "actually, this is pretty normal, and uhh... we don't really need that kind of pedigree for something as boring and unserious as college president". And you consider her an 'extremist'? She's very normal to me, and my only surprise (which isn't, really) is that some Dems are belatedly unhappy with or embarrassed by a creature that is their own making.

Do you have a right-wing closet Nazi analogue you'd like me to condemn? Somebody who isn't a Substack writer, or a third-rate grifter on a platform thats probably throttled to hell and back if it hasn't been outright banned from the Play/Apple store?

It took decades for Left Inc to finally 'police its own' and issue denunciations when some of them unapologetically stated they had no issue with the externination of Jews - despite this strain of antisemitism being loud and obvious to anybody paying attention and who wasn't wrapped up in the coalition.

It has never been loud and obvious to me in all my years of paying attention to politics. I have seen many far-left calls to destroy Israel, sure. But not to destroy Jews as an ethnic group. I mean, I often spend time in far-right online spaces where people call to destroy Jews as an ethnic group and I do not recall having ever seen anything similar in far-left spaces. Maybe there were coded calls that I missed, but in any case nothing loud and obvious.

Please avoid personal antagonism. If you’re going to call people liars, you need to be very careful about bringing the receipts.

Fair, and I should have known better.

I never know what the etiquette is for editing out sections of prior posts. Obviously, I said what I said and I meant it. And even though I shouldn't have, deleting it afterwards feels like a cover-up.

I'll take it out since it's not like it was entwined with any brilliant insights.

I would be content with you using strikethroughs, and then acknowledging your error.

Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair

I think your examples of "the left policing their own" are not examples of that at all. Both of these are better understood as examples of the Israeli lobby policing US speech, not as examples of the mainstream left policing its own extremists.

Mapping the Palestine question as a typical intra-left issue and then generalising it to infer that the mainstream left is broadly reining in the extremists is a bad model. More convincing would be some prominent examples of BLM types or authoritarian covid-safetyists or mass immigrant activists, getting overruled by moderates. But I don't think you're gonna find 'em.

In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists.

This is an incredibly risible claim. In 2020, during a period of mass rioting and looting, the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party used her social media platform to raise money for bail for the protestors. Black Lives Matter, an explicitly Marxist police abolitionist organization, is inextricably enmeshed with the funding apparatus of the Democratic Party. The Biden administration is overseeing the largest influx of unfettered immigration to this country in over a century - something infinitely more “extreme” and widely unpopular than anything you can credibly accuse Republican “extremists” of supporting.

In 2020, during a period of mass rioting and looting.....

It's a matter of comparison---the most direct analogue is the literal president of the US encouraging an attempted violent overthrow of the legislative branch.

Black Lives Matter, an explicitly Marxist police abolitionist organization

The analogue here is explicitly hereditarian and anti-meritocratic authors like Moldbug/BAP/some parts of the Claremont Institute being inextricably enmeshed in the intellectual foundations of the modern right.

The Biden administration is overseeing the largest influx of unfettered immigration to this country in over a century

This is also not necessarily so objectionable to people who value meritocracy over hereditarianism like most of the "centrist" authors in the original post. Skilled immigration is definitely not---even the most ostensibly right-wing, Elon Musk, supports dramatically increasing skilled immigration. Increased illegal immigration is getting huge amounts of pushback from the mainstream left and the numbers for that are always more about economic conditions than actual policy.

This is an incredibly risible claim

From your postings here, you are quite hereditarian and anti-meritocratic. Of course the comparison I'm making would therefore feel risible. From the point of view of the listed authors, who have much more mainstream American values, it makes a lot more sense.

  • -15

Having skimmed the Colorado ballot decision, it looks like the strongest evidence on offer of Trump encouraging violence is using the word “fight.”

If that’s not an isolated demand for rigor, I don’t know what is. Is there a single federal politician who hasn’t promised to fight or encouraged supporters to fight?

The Colorado court basically replaced the Brandenburg test with a new "bad actor" test where if you've used violent language and/or encouraged violence before (e.g. wanting to shoot looters), your words can be interpreted as being directed towards inciting imminent violent action even if they're entirely milquetoast and some other similarly-situated person could say the same words and received the full protection of the First Amendment.

It's a matter of comparison---the most direct analogue is the literal president of the US encouraging an attempted violent overthrow of the >legislative branch.

Didn't the Speaker of the House say there should be "uprisings all over." That means when a police station in Fort Green Brooklyn was overrun by a mob, and their vehicles torched with molotovs, it was a violent overthrow of the normal functioning of the judicial branch.

I just think leftists only apply this histrionic analysis in service of their own political goals, you are a great example.

You just have different standards for Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats tried to hand out debt relief to farmers but white farmers were excluded. It wouldn't even be conceivable for the Republicans to create a relief program that explicitly excludes blacks. But when Democrats do it it's just business as usual and not considered to be extreme.

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/state-offices/California/news-releases/2021/in-historic-move-usda-to-begin-loan-payments-to-socially-disadvantaged-borrowers-under-american-rescue-plan-act-section-1005_rel001

It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging. In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists.

The Democratic Party, absolutely. The few remaining normie Democrats and the Black Church Lady power base rigged the game in favor of boring normie Biden, and managed to keep the PMC libs mostly out of power.

The old Democratic Party is losing control though.

It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging. [...] You can even make a very unflattering comparison by just reading this forum for a bit and seeing how much support explicitly anti-meritocratic and anti-individualistic racism has in even the more intellectual part of the right.

As a meritocratic individualist, I completely disagree. The anti-meritocratic hereditarians here might hate mi abuela, but they still treat me with respect and state their points clearly. Dealing with DSA-types has been an exercise in frustration - try to argue with them fairly and they posture, form social alliances using whisper networks, make emotional appeals, play status games, etc.

I know I will be passed over for promotion due to my race. This isn't due to white nationalists, it's due to DSA-types.

There are people in the HR department who would gladly fire me. This isn't due to white nationalists, it's due to DSA-types.

My ability to earn a paycheck is affected by PMC white liberals in a way that it isn't by white nationalists.

My ability to earn a paycheck is affected by PMC white liberals in a way that it isn't by white nationalists.

This is a very strong counterpoint, and I definitely understand that my point here is not going to be very compelling to the stereotypical Motte user working at a Bay Area Tech company where they are only exposed to the excesses on the left.

Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).

As a meritocratic individualist, I completely disagree. The anti-meritocratic hereditarians here might hate mi abuela, but they still treat me with respect and state their points clearly. Dealing with DSA-types has been an exercise in frustration - try to argue with them fairly and they posture, form social alliances using whisper networks, make emotional appeals, play status games, etc.

I'm very surprised by this. I've spent significant time in some of the most infamous universities in the country and I've had a very, very different experience. As long as you can play an elaborate game of taboo---never explicitly saying words like "meritocracy" and instead directly appealing to the core values of MLK-style egalitarianism, I've found those on the left extremely pleasant and rational. I can very easily argue about how standardized tests are good, Harvard's affirmative action policy was bad, Claudine Gay was incompetent, etc. It very much felt like talking with people who had all the right values but were just very confused on some correctable factual points.

Conversely, trying to discuss anything with right, for example on this forum, generally means dealing with many unjustified personal attacks from people very explicitly not on board with individualism and meritocracy. Discussing with the right is useful to do to keep my perspective broad enough, but it is far, far more unpleasant.

  • -10

Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).

I live in a red state, and I work for an enormous faceless company. We have our HR zampolits imported from the mothership.

I've seen red state "censorship", which usually involves a governor preventing some state employees from saying something. This is an entirely different scale of problem compared to all the major tech companies conspiring to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, which likely caused the election to flip. This is an entirely different scale from the HR departments of all major corporations making sure everything you say is AWFL-approved. or you get fired.

Perhaps you don't remember 2020. I do. I remember that you could set a building on fire and that was free speech, but if you said the virus came from a lab that was violence and you got fired. I remember the outdoor mask mandates, the tech companies conspiring to get their candidate elected, and DEI struggle sessions. Like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, I got "redpilled" as the cool kids say.

The DSA types (but not the Democratic Party, I stress), are a direct threat to my ability keep my job, my children's ability to get an education and get a job, and my ability to speak and live freely.

The right? Sometimes they tweet stupid stuff.

I'll care about them when they run the HR departments, the university admissions, and the other gatekeepers of middle-class life. I'll care about them when they set my downtown on fire.

I'm very surprised by this. I've spent significant time in some of the most infamous universities in the country and I've had a very, very different experience. As long as you can play an elaborate game of taboo---never explicitly saying words like "meritocracy" and instead directly appealing to the core values of MLK-style egalitarianism, I've found those on the left extremely pleasant and rational. I can very easily argue about how standardized tests are good, Harvard's affirmative action policy was bad, Claudine Gay was incompetent, etc. It very much felt like talking with people who had all the right values but were just very confused on some correctable factual points.

Perhaps you were around the the last few techbro-adjacent normies, and even then you had to play elaborate taboo games.

Not my experience at all, but the DSA-types I (used to) have in my social circle tend to be young, white, female, and single - usually girlfriends/sisters/etc. of my friends. They're shrill, unreasonable, and emotional, and like everyone else I avoid them for my own safety and the safety of my family. Ironically for the white supremacists here, the wokest people I know are all white, and the most reasonable Democrats I know are your usual "Normie Middle Class Black Guy" you find in this part of the country. Hell, I'm technically "LatinX" (ugh) and before 2020 I was a Normie Democrat myself.

I was told "it's just a few kids in college", "it's just the HR department keeping the lawsuits away", and then 2020 happened and we let HR, the health bureaucracy, and universities run the country for a bit, and like everyone else, I got redpilled.

Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).

Name these orthogonal excesses and the parts of the country that are prone to them.

Depends on who the GOP nominates.

California used to have enough of this contingent to elect Arnold even when it went +20 for Obama.

I'm sure Arnold isn't acceptable to the GOP base nationally (nor should he be, he was a made-for-CA-only guy) but it's hard to dispute that whether or not moderates vote GOP depends heavily on the kind of candidates that party fields.

DeSantis is probably the most "anti-DEI" candidate and he faced a huge amount of backlash and got into a weird tiff with Disney for no reason (or cause Bob Iger wanted it)

Things may just be more polarized.

While I think there is a general right turn going on in the Western society at large, in these cases it must also be said that "lefty when younger, trending conservative when getting older" (everyone knows the ostensible Churchill quote about hearts and brains, after all) is one of the most classical, even cliche, progressions for a public intellectual to take.

Somewhat related, but recently one poll showed Trump with a yuuuge lead (20%!) among voters under 35. The poll is such a outlier that I would take it with a grain of salt, but it certainly updates me in the direction of young people actually preferring Trump to Biden.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-poll-joe-biden-washington-post-1829608

In almost every sense that matters, to my eyes, the parties considered "left" have become the same incumbent authoritarians that we fashionably rebelled against when we were young, in the sense that their declared agendas amount to "we would like to prescribe and proscribe more things, but the antisocial forces of chaos aligned against us prevent us from doing so".


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