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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25823 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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'Eunuch-maker' case: Male escort jailed for removing man's genitals

A male escort who cut off a consenting man's genitals and filmed the procedure for a pay-per-view website has been jailed for five years.

Damien Byrnes, 36, removed Marius Gustavson's penis and testicles with a kitchen knife in February 2017. Byrnes, along with Jacob Crimi-Appleby, 23, and Nathaniel Arnold, 48, pleaded guilty to causing GBH with intent. Crimi-Appleby froze Gustavson's leg in dry ice, leading to its amputation, while Arnold part-removed a nipple.

Crimi-Appleby was jailed for three years and eight months. Arnold was given a two-year suspended prison sentence. The Old Bailey had previously heard the procedure carried out by Byrnes is linked to a subculture where men become "nullos" - short for genital nullification - by having their penis and testicles removed.

Prosecutor Caroline Carberry KC said Byrnes, from Tottenham in north London, was among 10 people charged with taking part in extreme body modifications. She told the court Byrnes was hired by Gustavson, who called himself "the eunuch-maker" and had been involved in "numerous" extreme body-modification procedures including the removal of other men's genitals.

Kate Mulholland, the Crown Prosecution Service specialist prosecutor for London, said: "Consent is not a defence to the illegal surgical procedures the men willingly took part in to remove their ringleader's penis, leg and nipple, in non-sterile and on occasion life-threatening circumstances." [emphasis mine]

To summarize, four gay men are convicted over the illegal surgical removal of one of the men's genitalia, a leg and a nipple. Three were fetishists (including the ringleader, who was the 'victim' of the procedures), one was an escort. The escort subsequently blackmailed the ringleader, and it was this blackmail attempt that resulted in the case coming to the attention of the police and all four men being arrested and charged.

The man who removed the genitals (Byrnes, the escort) was jailed for five years. The man who removed the leg (Crimi-Appleby) was jailed for three years, with his comparatively young (but still adult) age and alleged 'grooming' by the ringleader mitigating factors. The man who removed the nipple (Arnold), and who stole anaesthetic from the hospital where he worked as a nurse, was spared jail with a two-year suspended sentence because his coworkers all agreed he was a really nice guy. The ringleader, Gustavson, the 'victim' of the procedure, will be sentenced in March.

There are a number of interesting CW-related issues in this case.

I. The "nullification" fetish

With the exception of the escort, all the men involved in the case belonged to a niche fetish revolving around becoming eunuchs. Interestingly (and unlike many other niche sexual fetishes, eg. those involving sexual cannibalism), nullification actually spans both gay and trans subcultures and might actually be a predominantly trans subculture. In fact, a moderate number of fetishists I found online appeared to be natal women (ie. FtM), although most who actually carried out illegal body modification are of course men (removing the breasts and the entire vagina/clitoris presumably being beyond the capabilities of backroom amateur surgeons, plus greater male risk-taking etc).

Among trans people, 'nullification' is often the desired goal of non-binary 'truscum' (those who believe that you need to be dysphoric to be trans, but more generally 'hardcore' transgender activists who despise those they consider cis identifying as trans for 'clout'). (Reddit thread) By this logic, while a 'cure' for males who want to be women is vaginoplasty, and for females who want to be men is phalloplasty, for a 'non-binary' dysphoric individual, these are unsuitable, since the whole point is to be 'between' genders. Nullification to Ken Doll status is sometimes seen as a goal. It also isn't actually illegal, and at least some years ago (again, according to reddit) there were American doctors willing to perform it.

In this case, the men involved do not seem to have been trans. Instead, they were participants in the 'eunuch' fetish subculture among gay men, where participants are known as 'eunuchs', 'nullies' or 'smoothies' respectively. Beyond eunuch communities themselves, one of the major sources of information about the subculture comes from TERFs, who are uniquely hostile towards eunuchs among gay men, because they (typically lesbian women) see them as - alongside transwomen - the vanguard of inserting fetishes into the 'LGB' movement they once held dear. Here, for example, is a long takedown of Gustavson by Canadian TERF website Reduxx.

Of course, Gustavson didn't only remove his genitalia but his leg, too, something that would likely classify him as suffering from 'Body integrity disorder', a partially-recognized psychological condition. Again, some patients, even in the UK, have had healthy limbs surgically removed, although this was highly controversial and the practice was largely discontinued. In Australia, a surgeon sought ethical advice about a similar case in 2017; this medical ethics article covers a similar case of a man with a lifelong goal of having a leg amputated, but who was unable to find a doctor willing to perform the surgery.

A core goal of eunuch fetishists is to have their fetish classified as a gender identity, which would allow them much easier access to surgery. It is this that drew the ire of the TERFs, who generally dislike sadomasochistic gay male fetishes but aren't particularly focused upon them. This creates an interesting dynamic - for the TERFs, the association between eunuch fetishists and trans activists allows them to criticize the latter by association, while for Gustavson (who took a leading role in both Norwegian and British pride organizations), association with the 'mainstream' trans movement created the opportunity for a medical embrace of the subculture.

[One last interesting (although less relevant) question remains about the eunuch fetish, namely that nullification would seemingly remove sexual desire, which would seem to be important to a fetishist. This journal article hints at an interesting theory, that gay men live in such a non-monogamous and non-commital romantic landscape that nullification often serves as a fantasy involving the eunuch sacrificing their sexuality to win a dyadic, deep bond with another man (who requests it of them), for life.]

II. Consent and the nature of surgery

The statement by the prosecutor in this case ("consent is not a defence to the illegal surgical procedures the men willingly took part in to remove their ringleader's penis, leg and nipple, in non-sterile and on occasion life-threatening circumstances") is interesting because it does not clearly state whether the issue was the mutilation or the legality thereof. Certainly much of the case appeared reliant on footage (or descriptions of it) of the procedure, the fact that it was sold on a fetish site, and the fact that the participants were physically healthy individuals with no need to perform the procedures. The body horror aspect of the case was a major feature of the prosecution's case, and even the press release seeks to create empathy for the police and prosecutors who had to watch and work with the footage and other evidence.

At the same time, as discussed above, 'body integrity disorder' surgeries have been performed without legal challenge in the UK, gender reassignment is legal, and (as I say) there is some evidence that nullification procedures have been performed legally (in very, very small numbers) by doctors in Anglo countries like the US, UK and Australia. And the statement does leave open the door that the main issue the Crown has is that Gustavson was 'operated' on illegally, not the nature of the operation. One wonders whether the sentences would have been as strict if the participants had been transwomen waiting for a gender reassignment surgery slot, but it is the UK so it's hard to say.

There are arguably legitimate reasons why consent isn't the central factor in whether a surgical procedure is legal. The primary one is, of course, that blanket legalization would lead to the poor or desperate being taken advantage of by untrained surgeons who might mutilate them in horrific and costly ways, perhaps for life. Society has (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-myth-of-consensual-sex)[decided] that the cost of allowing consensual unlicensed surgery is great enough that it ought to be outlawed. The medical profession (or cartel, or guild, depending on perception) is then given a valuable monopoly on licensing surgeons in exchange for minimum standards of training and therefore supposedly quality.

But if a surgeon refuses to perform a nullification surgery on a gay man (for legal or personal reasons) but is happy to perform similarly invasive surgery desired for similar reasons on a transwoman, are we really just saying (as the TERFs argue) that some fetish-driven lobbying campaigns are more successful than others?

III. On the welfare hustle

Man, this case really has it all. Buried in the article is this line:

Crimi-Appleby, 23, from Epsom in Surrey, admitted freezing Gustavson's leg, in February 2019...Gustavson, who now uses a wheelchair, received about £18,000 in benefits payments afterwards, the court heard.

Illegal surgery, especially in a welfare state, is costly. Gustavson went to hospital immediately after each of his major illegal procedures (which he set up and organized), where he required additional treatment (he claimed, it's suggested, that he mutilated himself on these occasions). This was paid for by the state and therefore the taxpayer. The issue of cost (which ultimately falls upon taxpayers or insured people) is also rarely discussed in relation to legal gender reassignment, even though vaginoplasty and phalloplasty require lifelong treatment and upkeep, regular visits with doctors, and (as with transition generally) lifelong use of prescription drugs.

The amputation of the leg, though, adds an additional dimension. When he returned home a disabled man, Gustavson was entitled to disability welfare, which he duly claimed. Few (particularly in a relatively rich country in which jobs are pretty easy to come by) are likely to amputate a limb to claim welfare, but other options (like severe mental illness) are more viable:

I encountered a patient whose medical record revealed that he’d had several hundred prior admissions to psychiatric facilities across the nation. During a 30-minute evaluation, it became clear that the patient was faking an episode of psychosis in order to gain admission to the hospital. When challenged, the patient eventually confessed that he had never suffered from any mental illness. Each month, after exhausting his disability payments, he ate and slept for free on mental health wards, where psychiatrists were afraid to turn away a patient who claimed to be hearing voices and having suicidal thoughts.

Society doesn't seem capable of managing this level of defection (or, alternatively, is just willing to swallow the cost). And while amputating a limb or making up a fake mental illness might be clear-cut, what about other self-inflicted conditions, like smoking or drug related illnesses? Is the purpose of welfare to support the deserving poor (like those born with disabilities through no fault of their own, widows raising children, and perhaps the elderly who never made enough to save for retirement), or is it to provide a minimum standard of living for everyone, no matter how objectionable? When Gustavson is released from his (likely) prison sentence, he will be able to continue claiming disability welfare as a wheelchair-bound person. Is that right?

Completely unrelated to the matter at hand, but did reading “nullification fetish” trigger a mental image of John C. Calhoun dressed in black leather for anyone else?

Somebody needs to make a Victoria 3 mod for this ASAP.

I don't have much to say but, is any conceivable one time sexual experience worth losing your fucking nuts over?

Like I doubt even having sex with Scarlette Johansson, Ana De Armas and 30 other hot women all at once while on cocaine and heroin and dick pills from Valhalla (they are on some other wordly sex drugs too), would still be worth losing your nuts and a leg. Like wtf.

That's why this is an online photoshopping-images fetish rather than a real-world actually-doing-things fetish (like a lot of internet fetishes), and it makes the news every time someone is actually crazy to try something in real life once every decade or so.

Same with cannibalism and other extreme stuff, you hear a single story once a decade and everyone wants to act like it's the tip of the iceberg, but no, it's really just that one insane dude plus a bunch of fanfiction online.

On the slightly-less-extreme (at least compared to nullification and cannibalism) end of the scale, I sometimes think of that one reddit post by the guy who got into scat porn, hired someone to oblige him and then immediately regretted it.

Out of the small portion of people who actually go through with these fetishes, I wonder how many of them immediately regret bringing them into reality.

There's a crazy-sized hole here. I don't think this guy was rationally maximizing utils(well, maybe the hooker who didn't cut any of his parts off); he was a nutjob.

I don't have a particularly good model of this as kink or lifestyle, but I don't think they're looking at it as a sexual experience in the "wow, what a great orgasm" sense, rather than desiring the end state, either as a description for extreme infertility/submissiveness/'nonmasculinity' (when moderated by hormone therapy), or as wanting to reduce sexual desire (in the case of some eunuchs).

(cw: male pain, contrasting)

Contrast 'ball-busting' or cbt, where the focus is about damage to the testes as itself being wanted, and either repaired and repeated or the character retired for a different one, and where in fantasy acts parallel to or in replacement of an orgasm. Of The Wilds and poiupoiu on SoFurry for examples in written form. Usually more femdom/male-on-male-dom focused, especially for 'normal' non-furry real-world actors.

That said, the lines between those two categories can be vague and complicated.

Is the purpose of welfare to support the deserving poor (like those born with disabilities through no fault of their own, widows raising children, and perhaps the elderly who never made enough to save for retirement), or is it to provide a minimum standard of living for everyone, no matter how objectionable?

Neither. The purpose of welfare is to minimize the cost to broader society from crimes borne out of not having enough(prostitution, shoplifting, unsafe housing, etc). It doesn’t have to do a perfect job of this to be worth the cost; I don’t particularly want a flophouse with broken windows on my street and will pay taxes to put some portion of the people that would otherwise create demand for run down flophouses in apartments instead.

That doesn’t mean everyone is equally deserving, but sometimes paying them to sit in a corner is easier and cheaper than forcing them to contribute. I don’t have to like it, and in fact I don’t, but we as a society don’t have any meaningful way of fixing the problem.

Now that being said, I do think welfare reform to incentivize good behavior and penalize bad behavior is easy to do and a bunch of, uncharitably, pinko do-gooders high on the communist fan fiction that passes for ‘research’ these days are preventing it(charitably, they’re mostly overly credulous and empathetic), or at least would be if our government was capable of doing anything. Lots of people belong in a jail cell, not section 8, welfare programs frequently discourage marriage, anti discrimination laws make it harder to reward good things among the poor, etc.

In this specific case, it sounds like all of these people should somehow be forcibly interned. ‘It’s a fetish’ should not be a defense to ‘you’re obviously insane’.

I think you are wrong about the purpose of the welfare state. The purpose of the welfare state is to mollify the 15% of people who are happy to barely scrape by if it means that they don't have to work. We pathologise personality issues these days, which means being lazy is a mental disorder.

Here's the thing though - the do-gooders were right, but not for the reason they think - it costs about $40k to keep people imprisoned in the US on average, welfare recipients cost much less and they volunteer for it.

Things can have more than one purpose; social housing decreases demand for unsafe and unsanitary living conditions that shit up the commons for lots of ordinary working people who have to share a street with them and makes do gooders and pinkos feel good about themselves for helping poor unfortunates and mollifies the people who care more about not having to be productive than about their standard of living. Presumably, it also helps some people who are poor through no fault of their own, but no one's ever really cared about them so that's more of a happy side effect than an actual goal.

It's also dramatically cheaper than prison, as you note.

prison is very cheap. Cheaper than a welfare state , as it can be done at scale.

Welfare state doesn't work that way in real life. "Idle hands are devils plaything", also it promotes single motherhood causing increased crime of the kids raised without fathers.

single motherhood probably works better in high trust, high IQ societies.

It’s not all together clear that welfare users commit crimes at a much higher rate than the working poor, or that there’s enough difference between the two groups to make that distinction. And in practice a lot of these benefits(eg suppressing flophouses) happen regardless.

it promotes single motherhood causing increased crime of the kids raised without fathers.

This is why I specified poor design of the welfare state encouraging bad behavior as a problem, yes.

We can't need a welfare state to prevent violent crime if it actually causes violent crime.

My post was mostly referring to petty crime, prostitution, flophouses, things of that nature. Violent crime is a different kettle of fish and best solved with policing, not any particular economic policy(and welfare doesn’t cause it either; it’s caused by a refusal to punish criminals until they escalate into heinous offenses).

Castration would have been legal if the gentlemen doing was a medical doctor and did it in an operating room with proper paperwork, right? He should have been charged with practicing medicine without a license.

Beyond eunuch communities themselves, one of the major sources of information about the subculture comes from TERFs, who are uniquely hostile towards eunuchs among gay men, because they (typically lesbian women) see them as - alongside transwomen - the vanguard of inserting fetishes into the 'LGB' movement they once held dear.

Hilarious, boy do I have bad news for them.

Castration would have been legal if the gentlemen doing was a medical doctor and did it in an operating room with proper paperwork, right? He should have been charged with practicing medicine without a license.

I didn't waste over a year of my life getting my GMC registration to just let any monkey with a scalpel do it for free. Then again, I hate performing surgeries, so maybe they can have this one, as a treat.

Hilarious, boy do I have bad news for them.

I don't think it's uncommon for TERFs to dislike gay men, they're men after all, but they tend to dislike transwomen and straight men more.

TERF as a generic term for a woman not on board with trans agenda must be a brilliant psy-op. "Oh, some lady doesn't think that Chris Chan is as much of a woman as her? She must be the reincarnation of Valerie Solanas from Society for Cutting Up Men!".

In this case if you follow the links in my post I am referring to self-identified actual TERFs.

Psy-oped. There's nothing radical about being TE.

That seems to fundamentally misunderstand how words work together? That's like someone linking to an organization for self-identified gay Republicans and someone else replying "There's nothing gay about being a Republican". Yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean there aren't gay Republicans.

People are perfectly capable of being both gay and Republicans and identifying with both those labels, just as they are perfectly capable of being both radical feminists and anti-trans and identifying with both those labels.

What is so radical about those broads then?

They are actual literal radical feminists. They hate trans women because they hate men(which trans women are), not because of anything against gender transition.

More comments

Radical Feminism is (and especially was) primarily defined in contrast to Liberal Feminism and Marxist Feminism. While Liberal Feminism is primarily concerned with women gaining equality before the law and Marxist Feminism is primarily concerned with dismantling capitalism (as it sees oppression of women as downstream from exploitation of labor and the ownership of private property), Radical Feminism holds that the oppression of women is part of a broader system of patriarchy where women are dominated by men and that equality cannot be achieved by equality before the law or the dismantling of capitalism as the patriarchal social structures would still remain.

Most modern western Feminists who actually actively call themselves Feminists are in fact Radical Feminists, though they usually identify primarily with one of its offshoots. Think of like how a wide variety of different Christian denominations are still Nicene Christians, despite their other disagreements on matters of theology and identification. Someone specifically identifying themselves as "Nicene Christian" or refusing to get more specific than "Christian" probably tells you they have some theological disagreements with other people who would also be accurately described as "Nicene Christians", but they agree on some key elements.

Arguably a lot of Marxist Feminists are more "Radical" in their beliefs/methods than actual "Radical" Feminists, much like "Gay" Republicans are probably not that much happier (if at all happier) than straight ones.

I don’t think you’re using “psy-op” in the same sense as the other commenters.

It's not a generic term, socially conservative people who are both anti-feminist and anti-trans just get called bigots or w/e.

TERF is specifically for people like JK who consider themselves feminists and enlist in 'protect the women' arguments into their anti-trans rhetoric.

JK Rowling is a middle aged rich woman who votes for labor and agitates for women's rights in Iran (far, far away and completely UK regime approved) on twitter. She's extreme only in that she's extremely milquetoast.

Trans-Exclusive Regular Feminist

As a neutral observer who just thinks it's fun to watch women destroy each other, the existence of TERFs strikes me as intuitively obvious.

If "what is a woman" is a fight worth fighting, women who have fought to advance the causes and benefits of women will see their work undone. They see what power they (believe) they've wrested from the men slipping through their factory-broken, labor-calloused fingers disintegrating, and they don't like it.

If even New-Labour-Government-neutered, "wizards invented magic to disintegrate their own shit" JK has figured it out, the midwits who haven't are really in for a rude awakening.

That's like saying that a murderer is just impersonating a corrections officer because the death penalty exists.

A doctor wouldn't be able to get the proper paperwork for this situation because it's not a medically approved procedure in this context, any more than doctors are allowed to give people chemotherapy for a hangnail. A doctor would have been convicted of the same exact crime.

People totally can get castrated for gender affirming care purposes in UK. Would-be-eunuchs just must have not assembled a pressure group to get fully included in that scheme.

Wasn't there a long post about two people deep in nullo boards being bigwigs in setting gender affirming care policies here some time ago?

First of all, they cannot, they can get a different surgery with some similarities. Medical board would not approve what this escort did as gender-affirming care.

Second of all, this was not intended as gender affirming care, see again 'not allowed to treat a hangnail with chemotherapy'.

First of all, they cannot, they can get a different surgery with some similarities.

Specifically, what are the differences that you think exist? Are you sure you're not just splitting hairs?

Medical board would not approve what this escort did as gender-affirming care.

Again, specifically, what do you think they would not approve? An amatour performing surgery? Obviously. The surgery itself? Something else?

Second of all, this was not intended as gender affirming care, see again 'not allowed to treat a hangnail with chemotherapy'

This argument makes no sense. "Not being allowed to treat a hangnail with chemotherapy" has no bearing on whether or not this was gender affirming care or not.

A doctor wouldn't be able to get the proper paperwork for this situation because it's not a medically approved procedure in this context

What evidence do you have that this is the case? What paperwork do you even think is required for a doctor to perform an operation like that?

Thanks for the post, I've adjusted my prior on being an expert in degenerate shit, for better or for worse I still have a long way to go. Every day we stray further from God's light.

<...> TERFs, who are uniquely hostile towards eunuchs among gay men, because they (typically lesbian women) see them as - alongside transwomen - the vanguard of inserting fetishes into the 'LGB' movement they once held dear.

Serious question - how is a "fetish" different from a sexual preference or whatever you call, uh, the mechanism by which someone can experience arousal/attraction? Is it like, a preference is broadly categorical maybe specifying other broad traits like race or build (I am attracted to %gender% of %body_type%) while a fetish is more narrow and icky specific (I am attracted to %gender% which have %some_trait% or do %some_thing%)?

Is it just Russell all the way down, in the vein of "I am biologically attracted to men - you are gay - he is a disgusting faggot"?

But if a surgeon refuses to perform a nullification surgery on a gay man (for legal or personal reasons) but is happy to perform similarly invasive surgery desired for similar reasons on a transwoman, are we really just saying (as the TERFs argue) that some fetish-driven lobbying campaigns are more successful than others?

Seems to be the read for me too, but there's too much space for mental gymnastics here, the ambiguousness of the actual "offense" is probably deliberate.

A distinction I often see made online, though I'll admit this might be like The Simpsons Jealousy vs Envy distinction (that is to say, not actually a distinction consistent with current or historical use), is that a fetish is required for arousal/climax while a kink is not.

So someone who gets off on feet would have a foot kink, someone who needs feet to get off would have a foot fetish.

So someone who gets off on feet would have a foot kink, someone who needs feet to get off would have a foot fetish.

I thought it was the other way around. a fetish was something unusually specific and arrousing, and a kink was the same but obligatory. "kink" like a kink in a hose, a blockage, an obstruction, something you have to work around.

Would this suggest that someone having multiple different fetishes would need all of them present to get off?

It would more likely suggest to me that those aren't their actual fetishes, but are merely triggers for a deeper fetish. For instance, a person who gets off on being peed on may have a piss fetish or they may have a humiliation fetish (or some other fetish) that being peed on happens to trigger.

It would explain how deep the e.g. doujinshi iceberg goes.

I think one could argue they would still be fetishes if the person has, say, 3 and they need at least 1 of the 3 at any given time but not necessarily all 3 at once.

Though if someone has 99 and they need just 1 at any time, it could surely just be rounded off to just not liking vanilla sex.

I'm all for radical morphological freedom, and happen to be libertarian enough to not even be against people without sufficient training or common sense dabbling in the fine arts of cutting things off a human body. If everyone involved consents, why should Jesus the UK Government object?

Though I would certainly advocate for making that numpty ineligible for welfare of any form, he quite literally lacks a leg to stand on. Welfare should be a safety net, not an opportunity to try bungie-jumping without a cord while expecting it to catch you.

In other words, I demand people get the right to be stupid, even if I find it painful, as long as they avoid imposing externalities on everyone else, or remove that option from them by refusing to give them free money.

Thankfully, the proportion of people willing to go to such lengths solely for the purposes of being a free loader are so tiny they make Lizardman's Constant look like Godzilla, so it's not a particularly pressing matter. But we're not a Full Automated Luxury Space Communism (yet, and the sexuality should be optional), and these idiots should not get to benefit from skimming off the top of other humans earnestly burning their finite lifespans doing productive work. They can sit around and get paid for it when we all have no choice in the matter.

I actually don't know to what extent gender reassignment surgery is covered by the NHS, but at least that sclerotic institution pays lip service to the idea of cost-benefit, if only because it's underfunded. I suspect a proper analysis would rule out gender reassignment via surgery, even for truly hardline or sincere demands, but I haven't done the maths, even using such divorced and clinical figures as QALYs and DALYs.

To me, an ideal outcome would be:

  1. These fools get to perform whatever they like on each other.

  2. The government doesn't throw them in jail, but simply withholds any welfare or further treatment, since the level of pre-meditation and personal desire makes it qualitatively different to say, treating someone who tried to commit suicide because of mental illness.

  3. They figure out how to survive, be it off alms or because lacking a leg doesn't actually kick you out of the workforce, though such a lack of knowledge should make you unemployable in the Knowledge Economy. They probably wouldn't starve to death, not that I would consider that unacceptable.

removing the breasts and the entire vagina/clitoris presumably being beyond the capabilities of backroom amateur surgeons, plus greater male risk-taking etc

Mastectomies are difficult enough, I have to clean up after in my day job. Removing the clitoris? Any witch-doctor can do it, and given that female genital mutilation is a thing, do. It's not that hard, and on an unrelated note I had a buddy back in med school who would make cash on the side snipping tips (male) in his living room.

I recently overheard an argument between several Plastic Surgeons and a Psychiatrist where in the surgeons argued that seeking plastic surgery is pathognomonic for body dysmorphia. They asserted that wanting to adjust your own appearance to submit to external (or internal that is informed by external) standards is inherently dysmorphic. It can be relatively harmless in the case of a rhinoplasty, but can be radical as seen here.

I should note that both surgeons seemed very happy to feed the dysmorphia aka Get Paid.

The psychiatrist tried to define what "illness" is and use that angle, but appeared to be on the losing end of the argument.

I haven't thought about this enough to have landed on one side or the other, but I think it is very reasonable to think of this as a sliding scale and a fuzzy one at that.

If we are paying for top and bottom surgery why not this? The conversation on this particular topic is of course very unhealthy, and the people who advocate for dysmorphia treatment are typically allergic to formal analysis and typology on these topics which complicates the matter.

We don't have a good handle of what mental illness and it makes it hard to have a formal judgement as to if this behavior (and others) are okay or not and how to handle them on a legal and financial level.

I stan the psychiatrist here, there are millions of ways in which even the majority of humans wish to "adjust their appearance", from getting haircuts to piercings. Lumping it all together as a manifestation of "body dysmorphia" dilutes it to uselessness, even if you try and restrict it to just those that require surgery. I wager a large fraction of the populace wouldn't say no to free/perceptually safe surgery for even minor cosmetic blemishes, and most don't because of at least the former, as well as general inertia.

If we are paying for top and bottom surgery why not this? The conversation on this particular topic is of course very unhealthy, and the people who advocate for dysmorphia treatment are typically allergic to formal analysis and typology on these topics which complicates the matter.

I forward the obverse, that I expect a proper cost-analysis that considers DALY and QALY to show that top and bottom surgery don't provide enough benefit to be worth providing, at least as free services through public healthcare systems. I haven't run the numbers myself, nor am I aware of a formal attempt, but that still happens to be my expectation.

Am I against people getting that done, on their own dime? Or surgeons doing them? Not at all. I just don't want general taxpayers, be it through subsidizing the NHS in the UK, or through greater insurance premiums elsewhere, to be the ones footing the bill.

If said hard-nosed analysis did show that the procedure provided net positive QALY (at about the same rate per pound as any normal surgery), then I would accept that as justification for it to be universally available to the dysmorphic. For free (to them, via the NHS or insurance).

The psychiatrist tried to define what "illness" is and use that angle, but appeared to be on the losing end of the argument.

I haven't thought about this enough to have landed on one side or the other, but I think it is very reasonable to think of this as a sliding scale and a fuzzy one at that.

Shame said shrink wasn't a Dr. S. A. Sisskind, he'd have rekt them.

But the real one already has excellent essays on the topic, just in case you haven't read these particular ones:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/07/contra-caplan-on-mental-illness/

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kirkegaard-on-evolutionary

While I don't agree with Scott on everything, I lean towards his pragmatic approach here.

I actually disagree pretty intensely with Scott on most medical adjacent topics (most especially his views on the FDA). I think he's a philosopher and a wise person who happens to work as a physician and not really immersed in the milieu of medicine (likely driven by where he has gotten his training). It's unlikely this impairs his care for the population he chooses to treat, but for the most part he doesn't really act or think like a doctor (granted Psychiatrists often do this).

And sorry, I have thought about mental illness is, just not this body dysmorphia claim (and I can see how the way I wrote that would make that unclear).

In any case, I think if the surgeons had split off signaling from "dysmorphia" it would be easier to agree with them. A piercing or a tattoo is trying to say or express something, even if the latter is "permanent." An adjustment of your body to what you feel like you need to be seems naively dysmorphic. One example thrown out was "if an OnlyFans creator wants a boob job to make more money is that dysmorphia" and it was asserted yes, and I think you are right that greatly erodes whatever dysmorphia is supposed to mean, but still I'm willing to go with "eh, mild end of the scale."

Shame said shrink wasn't a Dr. S. A. Sisskind, he'd have rekt them.

  1. "Siskind".

  2. I haven't met Scott in person, so I'm not sure how effective he is in a real-time format, but I should note that this doesn't correlate very well (notice that politicians are typically excellent at quips and real-time debate but uninspired at essay-writing).

since the level of pre-meditation and personal desire makes it qualitatively different to say, treating someone who tried to commit suicide because of mental illness.

Isn't something like nullification a pretty solid indicator of mental illness? FWIW I agree that we should give more sympathy/pity to people who attempt suicide, but I have a hard time identifying the difference.

Maybe the usually higher level of pre-meditation and planning plays a role, but I'd still sympathize more with someone who planned a suicide attempt over months than someone who planned and received a nullification over the course of a day or two.

I can certainly discriminate between different types of mental illness, and have no qualms about doing so.

A BPD art-hoe and a depressed incel are both self-destructive, for no "fault" of their own (as popularly conceived as ethereal metadata not grounded in material properties), but one is far more destructive towards others.

A depressed person often doesn't want to be depressed. Or they feel terrible about being a burden, most of them aren't overdosing on paracetamol to get on welfare when their liver fails (presuming that doesn't kill them). In the UK, they are lucky to have the NHS around to save their ass for free (and me, eventually, though I charge for my services), but they do not undergo dangerous, crippling procedures to indulge a fetish and expect other taxpayers to clean up after them. The closest are the people into self-harm, and razer cuts and burns are nowhere near as expensive to treat, presuming they don't grow out of it.

Many would prefer not to be saved. We insist on saving them. I have mixed feelings on the matter, including extending to euthanasia: suffice to say that if rules and regulations didn't tie my hands, I would let a lot more people who didn't want to live on philosophical grounds kill themselves (presuming it wasn't just pure depression, or at least a form of depression that can be cured/managed to provide an acceptable QOL). Alas, the law and my medical licensing bodies disagree, and I care more about my paycheck than my principles here.

On the other hand, our friend Nullius Maximus here? While I have no way to prove it, I think he was mentally competent to gauge the consequences of his actions, and would likely have not gone through with it if he was left with the burden of fending for himself. And if he had, he wouldn't be newsworthy, just another crazy who killed himself for dubious reasons. Here, his craziness can be presumed to be sly.

That is far worse, as far as I'm concerned. I endorse his ability to do as he pleases. I do not endorse shielding him from the consequences of his actions.

A BPD art-hoe and a depressed incel are both self-destructive, for no "fault" of their own (as popularly conceived as ethereal metadata not grounded in material properties), but one is far more destructive towards others.

And to be clear it is the BPD art chick causing harm to people around her and the incel silently seething but not hurting anyone.

I would hope that was obvious, but I suppose it's worth clarifying in case someone came away thinking I was making the opposite argument.

Understood. Which is why I'm pointing out that the opposite is actually true. Incels are (to within round off error) harmless. BPD art chicks are very harmful to the unfortunate people drawn into their social sphere.

A BPD art-hoe and a depressed incel are both self-destructive, for no "fault" of their own (as popularly conceived as ethereal metadata not grounded in material properties), but one is far more destructive towards others.

I suppose men are more predisposed to criminality, but neither is likely to be harmful to others.

The amount of damage a typical incel can cause is far more bounded than what a reasonably attractive woman with borderline personality disorder can inflict. The overwhelming majority of incels don't go around shooting up schools, they sulk and argue on 4chan. People with BPD are corrosive to the psyche, uncovered flames that draw moths for miles.

You're (were?) a regular on the RSP subreddit, I'm sure you can imagine all the examples you like.

I’m not sure it’s a particularly good argument for the harmlessness of the incels that they congregate on 4chan, one of the most culturally influential websites on the planet, molding the headspaces of countless young men all over the world (some young women as well).

One of the precise risk factors of the incel subculture is that exposure to it seems to convince numerous temporarily virginal 17-year olds (or even younger types) that it’s over, women will only have sex with them if they’re a chiseled sociopathic gigachad, nothing they do can matter since they’re [short/fat/not rich/weak-chinned/Asian/etc], best not even try.

I’m not sure it’s a particularly good argument for the harmlessness of the incels that they congregate on 4chan

The gynosupremacists/femcels hang out on Twitter. I only see one of those two sites in the news constantly, so I believe the one I continue to hear claimed as a legitimate source by the vast majority of world media is taken a lot more seriously.

And then it is this core demographic that forms the backbone of the education-managerial complex as well as a significant chunk of state bureaucracies. The angry women are, in aggregate, much, much more dangerous than the angry men.

AFAICT, the only reason people look down on their argument is that it denigrates higher status people than them in doing so (ie, women). Remove that and you get a bog standard feminist argument that men shouldn't seek validation from women through sex.

On a per capita basis? The average incel, be it on 4chan or elsewhere, is largely harmless.

And 4chan has all kinds of mentally ill people, from the humble incel, to schizos, to Taylor Swift.

I thought the implication was that the art-hoe was more dangerous to others. I picture the depressed incel not leaving the basement; the BPD, out keying cars over imagined slights.

That is indeed what I'm getting at. Anyone who disagrees hasn't met enough depressed incels or women with BPD. I have the dubious fortune of knowing plenty of both.

Is the purpose of welfare to support the deserving poor (like those born with disabilities through no fault of their own, widows raising children, and perhaps the elderly who never made enough to save for retirement), or is it to provide a minimum standard of living for everyone, no matter how objectionable?

Society has a level of structural unemployment of around 5%, so from a pragmatic perspective if society is designed in such a way that by design a large number of people are going to be structurally without jobs they should also not risk starving to death in the process? If some degree of unemployment is desirable then ensuring the people who are made unemployed don't starve to death in the process just kind of makes sense.

I looked into this a bit - the "ideal level of employment is 3-5%" comes up a lot but I didn't track it back to a primary source. My understanding is that this is meant to refer to 'frictional' employment rather than 'structural' employment. That is, at any given time 3-5% of people should be temporarily looking for new jobs which they then find, to keep job markets liquid. 'Structural' employment, referring to people who are permanently jobless, is unavoidable in practice but not desired.

https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/unemployment-rate

https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/fdi-drivers/why-low-unemployment-rates-are-a-bad-thing/

Society has a level of structural unemployment of around 5%, so from a pragmatic perspective if society is designed in such a way that by design a large number of people are going to be structurally without jobs they should also not risk starving to death in the process?

There is no such design. Furthermore, structural employment includes those who have made themselves unemployable, such as those who decided dropping out of school to do drugs full time was a good idea.

Beyond eunuch communities themselves, one of the major sources of information about the subculture comes from TERFs, who are uniquely hostile towards eunuchs among gay men, because they (typically lesbian women) see them as - alongside transwomen - the vanguard of inserting fetishes into the 'LGB' movement they once held dear.

Because of course they would never try to put the public on the hook for their own medical fetishes. It is rather insulting how clearly many lesbians physically fetishize men while denying they have any attraction to them. "I'm not sexually attracted to men." "Then why do you insist you have the right to sexual reproduction via a man's sperm?"

I don’t think gay men who use surrogates are secretly sexually attracted to women.

Gay men who use surrogates, assuming they are the sperm donors, are engaging in a sexual act (sexual reproduction) with a woman. Similarly, lesbians who use sperm donors to get pregnant are engaging in a sexual act (sexual reproduction) with a man. What's the difference between wanting to engage in a sexual act with a member of the opposite sex and being sexually attracted to them?

This is equivocation between two different meanings of the word "sexual". One is "having to do with gamete mixing", the other is "having to do with orgasms". "Sexual attraction" is firmly in the "orgasms" side of the dichotomy, and sperm donation on the "gamete mixing" side.

Orgasms are only sexual because they can result in gamete mixing. If you remove that, what's to differentiate them from any other form of physical activity? Why should they be considered special?

There is a sense in which that is true. However, on the level of evolved human psychology, it is orgasms which are the fundamental drive with intrinsic rewards that facilitates pair-bonding, and so in that sense it is also exactly backwards: gamete mixing is only "sexual" because it happens to be a common side effect of one of the typical ways to seek orgasms with a partner. Why should gamete mixing be considered special, compared to blood transfusions?

Why should gamete mixing be considered special, compared to blood transfusions?

I'm not arguing it should be. I'm asking why other people consider sexual orientation to be some sacred piece of their identity that needs to be special-cased in law, but then carefully define sexual orientation to only consider a subset of acts that can be considered sexual. If it is all about physical intimacy rather than sexual reproduction, why is it not romantic orientation?

Because the physical intimacy is the part that has the psychological drives attached to it. "Sexual orientation" is explicitly about the psychological drives. That's what they care about protecting.

Tabooing the phrase “sexual act,” there are two obviously distinct clusters. Reproduction is not the same thing as intercourse, even though one can follow from the other. I can say I would like to eat a nice meal without personally being the one to cook it.

Clarification: In this metaphor is a woman having your child the chef and you are the... eater of the baby?

Yes.

One cannot taboo the phrase "sexual act", as it is entwined with the phrase "sexual orientation". If we limit the definition of "sexual orientation" to non-reproductive acts, why should "sexual orientation" be treated specially as a protected category?

Some terms and phrases mean a variety of very different things. We're clearly experiencing that here, so in an effort to resuscitate clear communication, let's stop using that term and instead plainly say the particular definition of it you actually mean.

Or "taboo" it as lesswrong posters would say.

"How can lesbians want to [get an egg fertilized by donated sperm] if they don't also want to [get fucked by] men?"

The point seems rather trivial now.

Or "taboo" it as lesswrong posters would say.

Yes, I know how the community uses the word "taboo" in this situation.

The point seems rather trivial now.

Does it?

"How can [people who claim to not be attracted to men strongly enough to have created an identity around it that is legally protected more strongly than nearly any other] want to get pregnant if getting pregnant requires [the participation of a man] to fertilize their eggs?"

Your question is just trivial. Lesbians can have participation of men in many aspects of life. So long as they aren't also having sex with them, then they're still lesbians and not in some contradictory way.

Also, isn't their identity based on mutual attraction to women? Is this reframing gayness as a negative rejection of the opposite sex?

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By taboo I mean use a different, more clear phrase for what you want to describe. Break out what you mean by "sexual act," because it seems obvious to me that there are lots of "sexual acts" that are not procreation, and lots of sex-adjacent concepts--like personal hygiene, puberty, or romantic poetry--which are not well described as "sexual acts." The category is confused. Find a different way to describe it, and you'll have an answer to your question.

Break out what you mean by "sexual act," because it seems obvious to me that there are lots of "sexual acts" that are not procreation

I'm not trying to restrict "sexual acts" to only those that involve procreation though. I'm asking why procreative acts, which I believe should be central to the category, have been so thoroughly excised from it by others. What makes intercourse so important that it should completely push out everything else, and even that it should be expanded to cover things beyond PiV intercourse? To my eyes, the only plausible answer is that the people who did so are guilty of using self-motivated reasoning to gerrymander the definition to ensure they can have their cake and eat it too.

Find a different way to describe it, and you'll have an answer to your question.

No, I really won't. My confusion stems precisely from the definition of the category sexual because we consider sexual things to be special. Sexual assault is considered a worse offence than plain assault. Sexual harassment is considered a worse offence than plain harassment. Sexual orientation is similarly a legally protected category in much of the West. Somehow I'm displaying sexual entitlement by looking at a woman who chose to dress provocatively, but a woman isn't when she claims a right to be impregnated by people she's "not sexually attracted to" though? What kind of backwards definition is that?

EDIT: Grammar.

that the people who did so are guilty of using self-motivated reasoning to gerrymander the definition to ensure they can have their cake and eat it too.

Hence the other user with your sexual software package has the (absolutely defensible) answer of "and that's why they should never be allowed near the levers of sociopolitical power ever again".

The reason this definition remains stuck like this is mainly because of the socioeconomic effects described here- in short, the amount of economic opportunity for men-as-population is the check and balance against the social interests of women-as-population. Which is how some other commentators come to the conclusion "well, there must be too many men, female hypergamy means the ideal male:female sex ratio is 1:[some higher number]"- noticing the trees, but not the forest, of there not being enough economic opportunity available of the type for which men have the biological advantage to restore a more objectively equitable sociopolitical balance.

This sort of thing comes in waves as this balance adjusts following economic conditions- rather interestingly, the more economic opportunity exists for men-as-population as compared to women-as-population, the more the sexual balance is tilted away from the interests of women-as-population (employees seek minimum workload and maximum wage from their employers- for women, because the only thing they bring to the table for/as compared to men-as-population is beauty and youth, we should expect a society where women are more powerful relative to men to purposefully de-emphasize those qualities, and demonize attraction to them- so instead of a 40 year old man being able to afford a 15 or 25 year old wife, he'll have to settle for a barely-fertile, past-prime, bitter 35 year old instead, and we should observe men younger than that to be priced out of the market entirely, and judging by trends in the average age of marriage, they are).

This is why women-as-population love drag queen story hour, want shitty porn VNs in schools, and pretend that (absurdly ugly) men can be women too, why they believe that all men who might dare to interact with children is a predator, why they love the Science that claims "actually, you're not a human being until 25" as an excuse to argue it should be illegal to have sex with anyone under that age. It is why the claim traditionalists make about progressives "enabling pedophilia" does not logically follow.

And it is the reason women, who may not necessarily behave like women in aggregate do, won't meaningfully be concerned about changing things that are in their sociobiological interest (or in other words, "why feminists claims to believe in fairness between the sexes, but in reality will never work towards that").

No, I really won't.

Why did you even pick this fight, anyway? "Lesbians want kids so they go to the place where the cells that make them are", sure, but "and that means they're fetishizing men" doesn't logically follow from that claim. Or maybe I'm missing some dimension to "resource exists, human being wants access to resource to do Y".

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Thanks, I think I follow you.

If procreation has been excised from the category, where’s the contradiction? The gay man who wants to procreate doesn’t have to feel or do any of the other signifiers of “sexual acts.” No courtship, no tingly feelings, no intercourse. At least not with a woman. Given how much human motivation stems from one or another of those desires, his lack of them makes for a meaningful category.

Those in charge (though perhaps not their more numerous supporters) are well aware of the unreality of the liberal world-view. But they have one thing going for them, which is power. Enough power to make it so those below them are required to either usually behave as if the liberal world-view is true, or drop to the margins of society. And this is enforced by any means required up to and including the use of the US military.

To use your example of Daniel Penny, Penny saw the reality of a situation; he saw a dangerous man acting in threatening ways, and acted to stop him. The rule (set by the sovereign) in New York is that you pretend the homeless are annoying but harmless and deserving of nothing but help, right up until they put a knife in your kidneys or shove you onto the tracks. Penny broke that rule, and thus committed treason against the sovereign. It is here you miss the utter horror of the Hobbesian view. It is true but irrelevant that sovereign authority was not actually present on the train; sovereigns cannot be omnipresent now and they could only be less so in Hobbes's time. When the sovereign authority arrived, they determined that the laws of the sovereign were broken and held Penny to account. In the Hobbesian view, is the sovereign's absolute right to act or refrain from acting in any given situation; that the sovereign did not act did not give Penny any authority. He was supposed to, by the rules of the sovereign, allow Neely to act as he did. He did not, and so committed treason against the sovereign.

The rule (set by the sovereign) in New York is that you pretend the homeless are annoying but harmless and deserving of nothing but help, right up until they put a knife in your kidneys or shove you onto the tracks.

How many times does that actually happen a year, how many times would some 'hero' kill out of fear that it might be about to happen if we glorified and legally exonerated such vigilantism?

There's no moral calculus which concludes 'yay for more preventative lethal vigilantism against the homeless' that doesn't innately rely on valuing those lives less than the lives of everyone else.

How many times does that actually happen a year

At least 15 shovings onto the tracks in 2023 (as of October; I don't know the final number). At least 22 in 2022. 554 total felonious assaults, excluding robberies.

how many times would some 'hero' kill out of fear that it might be about to happen if we glorified and legally exonerated such vigilantism?

Fewer.

One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society.

Agreed. I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, and in doing so have met and worked with a lot of people who think very differently from the norms expected in "liberal society". It seems to me that there's something of a cult, of people who have only ever been in "liberal society" places and can't begin to even conceive that there are people out there who really do think very differently. They speak of "multicultralism", but all they really know is that those other people sure dress in some cool costumes and have fancy dances and tasty exotic food. The idea that these people also have very different values from them is unthinkable.

The type of person I have described is of course not every single "blue team" person. They're probably a minority in most places. But they definitely do exist, and I've met a number of people like that. I get the impression that their numbers are growing, spreading into more places, and becoming even more strident in their beliefs. I don't know how this ends, but I can't help but think something ugly is going to happen eventually. And along those lines,

Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so.

It seems rather funny in current year. Especially back in the 70s or so, there was such a culture of "revolution" and "overthrowing the system" and other such things being cool. They're still in love with the idea of protests and riots. Look how they cheered on the BLM protests of 2020! But then, Jan 6 happens, and oh, it's the most terrible horrible thing ever! Well, when you were talking about protests and riots and revolutions and overthrowing things being totally super cool, exactly what did you think it meant? It's hard for me to see it as anything but, oh all that stuff is great only when we do it, but if they do it, then it's terrible and unacceptable.

It's hard for me to see it as anything but, oh all that stuff is great only when we do it, but if they do it, then it's terrible and unacceptable.

The default state of everything is "I will love my friends and hate my enemies." It's a wonder of values that anyone ever decided to do anything else.

If you understand the current-day progressives as simply falling into the same human foibles that every other ideology has faced -- rather than taking their claims of enlightenment at face value -- then you truly begin to understand them. They aren't special, they aren't chosen, they aren't annointed, they aren't on "the right side of history," they aren't all-powerful, they aren't all good: they're humans, just like you and me. If they can tear down statues, I can tear down the idol of themselves they've built in their own heart, an idol of self-righteousness and pride. I even see in myself -- especially in the past, when I was younger, when I was drawn to progressive politics -- those features, that self-doubt that made me want to take the great figures of the past and spit on them, the deep and overwhelming desire to be right and just and dutiful, the desire to be better than others. But these are human follies, not progressive ones, they are sins of the flesh, not sins of the woke.

And so it goes, on and on, the spinning wheel of time, rhyming as it goes.

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done;

and there is nothing new under the sun.

When they're young a lot of people (myself included) had no patience with what was going on. The answers were so simple and obvious, why weren't the people supposedly in charge doing anything about it? Clearly the only way to make things better was to clear away most of everything in the way of government and institutions and bureaucracy and the rest of it, and the new, uncluttered, post-revolution society would be so much better.

Then I got older, discovered more of how the world works, and the important fact that inertia is a physical law, and I understood that "tear it all down!" would only result in the same old thing a little further on.

I think you’ve kind of elaborated on the wrong things (although I’m interested to hear more about the skateboarding and if we know any of the same spots).

The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview

But what are they? I do too though. I believe that there is a human instinct for retribution that has been delegitimized in academic penal theory regarding deterrence, and that a victim is actually owed this retributive justice because it instinctively feels good and its omission is a harm. Additionally I think that there are some things humans naturally find disgusting, and that disgust is also a harm (in a lesser but similar way that assault is a harm), and I found the class I took on Rawls laughable because the professor a priori denied that a person has a right to not feel disgust while possessing a right to not be slapped.

castrated our society's ability to discuss certain topics

But what topics?

Penny / Neely

I definitely agree here. Once a civil authority can no longer predictably keep you safe from crime or make satisfaction after the event, you should have the right to inflict corrective corporal punishment on the criminal provided you have sufficient evidence of the crime occurring (video recording). This is doubly true if the crime will not be investigated or if the response time is greater than half an hour. Our idea of withholding personal justice is predicated on the faith that our victimhood will be satisfied by a higher civil power. It’s also truly insane from a psychological position of (ironically) deterrence theory. Imagine if you withheld administering a slap on your dog after biting a child, and instead waited months before assigning a verdict. Such a process is only effective for rational intellectual creatures and criminals who reason about there actions longterm, not for your average violent or antisocial criminal. We could be deterring so much more crime by simply beating criminals immediately if sufficient evidence is obvious, or at the very least throwing them in a cell without food for 30 hours (the walls decorated with the psychological cues of their crime). This is actually vastly better for the criminal who hopefully develops a minor trauma response when considering criminality in the future.

Our idea of withholding personal justice is predicated on the faith that our victimhood will be satisfied by a higher civil power.

And this points to a major flaw in all social contract theories. There's no remedy within the system for breach on the part of society. Self help of the sort you describe is verboten. The sole judge of cases under the contract is society's representative (called "government").

The social contract is self-terminating.

If Penny and Neely had gotten into it in Mogadishu, he never would have been arrested. Because the social contract doesn't exist there. There's a DR line that goes "the police aren't there to protect you from criminals, they're there to protect criminals from you"- and that is in fact part of their job. In a state of nature when I discover someone trying to pick my pocket I maul him badly and part of the social contract is that I accept, in exchange for the police arresting him, that I don't get to put him in the hospital. And everyone knows it on some subconscious level. In a society where the police will not arrest criminals, citizens cut the hands off of thieves their damn selves and lynch mobs form at a moment's notice.

"Muh anarcho-tyranny" anarcho-tyranny is not a stable equilibrium. Lack of prosecutions result in police being less willing to do their jobs until whoops, Mr. Patel can break ribs on suspected shoplifters at his liquor store to his heart's content and the cops ain't doing shit. Eventually it doesn't get that far, of course; the bandidos show up and make Mr. Patel a deal; they take care of the ne'er do wells in very pinko-unapproved ways, and he pays them, with some forwarded to the police to file a report saying there's nothing to see there. Lack of enforcement of laws results in eroding state capacity until the state can't enforce the laws on normal people either.

That's the Leviathan shaped hole; someone is going to keep order even if it's not the government(at this point it's a failed state and usually taxes stop being paid). Establishing the Leviathan is a society-wide hock because threading the needle between pointlessly oppressive and so dysfunctional it loops back around into pointless oppression is a hard task with serious risk of grievous bodily harm.

The social contract is self-terminating.

Under what theory? Certainly not Hobbes.

and part of the social contract is that I accept, in exchange for the police arresting him, that I don't get to put him in the hospital

And if YOU breach that contract, the police arrest you and maybe put you in the hospital. But suppose the breach is on the part of the state... they don't arrest the miscreants. What's your remedy, as an individual, supposedly a party to this contract? None at all. Social contract theory is merely an elaborate moral justification for a demand to obedience to government; what differentiates Hobbes's version is it's less sugar-coated.

"Muh anarcho-tyranny" anarcho-tyranny is not a stable equilibrium.

It doesn't need to be a stable equilibrium: with enough force it can be maintained. As state capacity has risen, so has the capacity for anarcho-tyranny. When Bernie Goetz shot four men in the subway and buried the weapon upstate, he might actually have gotten away with it (he later turned himself in); there were no clear pictures of him. Had Daniel Penny tried to run, ubiquitous surveillance would have had him caught in no time.

The social contract exists because of the legitimacy of the king’s justice, and the king’s justice is legitimate because people- cops, sailors, shopkeepers, housewives, farmers, truckers, factory workers, street sweepers, you know, the mass of the commons- believe that it is just. The underclass has no meaningful social contract because they believe the kings justice is illegitimate; so they break the law at the drop of a hat and expect no protection from it either.

If Mr. Patel believes that there is no justice from the king, he will simply beat suspected shoplifters himself, and suspected shoplifters will probably not be filing police reports(they also don’t expect justice), so he can probably get away with it for awhile. But in practice, I suspect that a local 1%er MC will happily take a retainer fee to do far worse things than he would to ne’er do wells and miscreants that chose his liquor store as the location for their delinquency, and they don’t care if a member gets arrested from time to time- he’ll be out in far less time than the judge sentenced him to, and the cops aren’t willing to come down on the hell’s angels like a ton of bricks because why risk their lives like that for the king’s justice that is not just? Better to take a modest bribe and file a report saying no sir, that motorcycle clubhouse is a perfectly ordinary members-only bar, there’s nothing fishy or illegal going on.

The outlaw is outside the law, and being outside the law goes both ways. I know you’re eeyore, but surely even you can see that- ground level decisions in the real, material world matter, and cops have no sympathy for outlaws and outlaws don’t go whining to the cops even if they don’t expect to be themselves caput lupus; they have inaccurate ideas of how police encounters go and a sense of machismo forbidding it(what, you gonna squeal to the pigs like a battered woman?). It’s not just that maintaining a functioning society involves someone beating up lumpenproles, it’s that people trying to make a nice place for themselves in an otherwise dysfunctional craphole need the lumpenproles beaten up, and if they can’t free ride off the police they’ll have to do it themselves or outsource it to other rough men.

The people who go and physically do things matter and when the social contract loses legitimacy they stop doing the things pieces of paper from mandarins tell them to do and start doing the things that benefit them, personally. Corrupt cops are not great for the citizens, but they don’t do anything to protect the outlaws either, no matter what the mandarins say(why should they, they’ve got a union to cover them for not doing their jobs).

The social contract exists because of the legitimacy of the king’s justice, and the king’s justice is legitimate because people- cops, sailors, shopkeepers, housewives, farmers, truckers, factory workers, street sweepers, you know, the mass of the commons- believe that it is just.

The king's justice's "legitimacy" rests on the cops and the soldiers; the others don't matter unless the king wants them to matter (as Justin Trudeau made clear during the trucker protests)

If Mr. Patel believes there is no justice from the king, he may beat the shoplifters himself. But the shoplifters may well go whining to the police. Or it might get out of hand and result in something the police won't ignore. And unlike the local 1%er MC clubs, the cops WILL come down like a ton of bricks on Mr. Patel. They'll send him to Rikers Island, a very rough jail where, unless there's an ethnic-Indian protection gang (which there may or may not be), he's going to be hurt. When he gets out he'll have many restrictions on him and likely lose the licenses necessary to operate his store. Which doesn't matter all that much because the fees he pays to his lawyers mean he'll lose the store anyway. He'll likely be advised by his lawyers that his best bet is to plead to a lesser felony, which not only puts him back in prison but means for the rest of his life he will be unable to obtain licenses and such, so at best he'll end up working the night shift for his cousin in the cousin's store. And according to social contract theory THIS IS JUSTICE. The king said don't hurt the shoplifters, leave that to me. Then the king didn't do anything. The king played dog-in-the-manger with the monopoly on violence... but according to Hobbes and all the rest, this was absolutely something within the king's discretion to do.

The king's justice's "legitimacy" rests on the cops and the soldiers; the others don't matter unless the king wants them to matter (as Justin Trudeau made clear during the trucker protests)

The truckers won. They took a few licks, but as Kulak convincingly argues, they won.

And it’s worth asking ourselves who the cops and soldiers are. And in every society within modernity, they’re from the mass of the common people. Sometimes they’re from the upper end(second sons of kulaks or whatever) and sometimes they’re a cross section and sometimes they’re from the bottom. But the difference between ‘the opinions of cops and soldiers’ and ‘the opinions of housewives, janitors, shopkeepers, truckers, factory workers, bus drivers and all the rest’ is very small; the king’s power comes because masses of common ordinary people follow orders and don’t just say the follow orders and pocket the money like a bunch of education bureaucrats. The clerks and bartenders and truckers who have to deal with the consequences of anarcho-tyranny are the friends, neighbors, brothers, parents, romantic partners of the cops and army sergeants that the king depends on; the anarcho-tyranny phase sucks for them, but for that reason it is just a phase.

The truckers won. They took a few licks, but as Kulak convincingly argues, they won.

The truckers were utterly defeated and their leaders are still being prosecuted.

And it’s worth asking ourselves who the cops and soldiers are.

They're those selected for both a penchant for violence and willingness to obey the regime.

But the difference between ‘the opinions of cops and soldiers’ and ‘the opinions of housewives, janitors, shopkeepers, truckers, factory workers, bus drivers and all the rest’ is very small

No, they aren't. Cops are different; you've perhaps of the "us vs. them" dynamic among police officers? To police, police are "us". Sometimes a few other groups of public service workers such as EMTs are at least us-adjacent. Those other people, the janitors and truckers and factory workers and such? Those are the people the cops consider it their job to keep in line, they're "them". Soldiers are a different "us"; the military makes them into a breed apart, and so they remain.

ETA: You said

That's the Leviathan shaped hole; someone is going to keep order even if it's not the government

Yes, someone is keeping order. The Leviathan is the cops and the soldiers who are keeping the people in line. But it is also the schizos and petty criminals who have free reign. The prison gangs who impart harsh injustice to those who fall afoul the state's rules. The bevy of lesser officers who harass shopowners and other basically-decent citizens for violations real and imagined. Your "Mr. Patel" and the truckers and the Daniel Penny's of this world are kept in line by all those powers. The sort of order where a man may run a store and not fear to be robbed is one sort, and Hobbes would approve. But the order of Gotham City, where the criminals are given wide reign and the ordinary people are kept in line through fear of them on the one hand and the state on the other, is just as valid by Hobbes's philosophy. Who said the sovereign must rule on behalf of the decent man to suppress the scum? No, if the sovereign prefers the scum... well, he's still the sovereign.

Depending on how you are framing the contract, I think the remedies are supposed to be things like exit rights, voting, and revolution.

None of which are perfect, to be sure.

The actual terms are irrelevant, because they're all interpreted by government.

Saying that voting is irrelevant because it is interpreted by government feels like it's missing the point of democracy.

I can't tell if this is just a 'letting the perfect be the enemy of the good' thing; sure, the government could conceivably subborn democracy in a way that makes it irrelevant (at which point it's not democracy), and it certainly always does subborn it at leas at little bit (see: electoral college et al.). But those imperfections don't actually make democracy functionally identical to dictatorship, it's still actually a lot better than that in practice.

We could be deterring so much more crime by simply beating criminals immediately if sufficient evidence is obvious, or at the very least throwing them in a cell without food for 30 hours (the walls decorated with the psychological cues of their crime).

I disagree there. Excess punitiveness led to the opposite swing of the pendulum which we have now, where in some places crimes are not even prosecuted and instead reclassified as "aw shucks boys will be boys" horseplay. The insurance will pay for your cleaned-out store, why are you even complaining? If you insist on having a car parked in public, of course the window will be smashed so any items that may be inside can be stolen. So why would the police even bother, when they know nothing will come of it? To quote a story from 1909 about the same viewpoint:

"When a feller rushes up to a policeman an' ses — 'Come at once! There's a man knocking his wife about somethin' cruel,' he expects the constable to break into a run, an' is very much hurt when he only saunters along very leisurely. That's because the policeman knows a great deal about human nature. He knows that no wife really an' truly wants her husband pinched, an' if he runs he will get out of breath for no reason at all.

But you need the reform and rehabilitation as well as the punishment, otherwise you are just throwing the person back into the same environment from which they came. People starting off with petty crime will continue on the path to more serious crime, the serious criminals will just take 'doing time' as part of the package. There has to be a balance. Some small amount will be truly incorrigible and locking them up for long stretches will be the only way to deal with them, but some will also be willing to change, if they get help on to another path and support to keep them away from falling back into the same neighbourhood, same associates, same situations they were in before they were convicted.

And more convictions. Fewer slaps on the wrist. People plainly gaming the system having to face the consequences of their behaviour. Absolutely I agree with all that. But you can't just beat the crap out of them (though a timely slap round the back of the head for some of the 'youth' might do way more than all the bleeding-heart 'little Johnny can't help it, he's a victim of society' or being thrown into a cell with no food for two days) and leave it at that, for those who can be helped, then we should extend mercy. Mercy does not mean stupid or soft-hearted, though.

We haven’t had excessive cue-response punishment in America for a long time, because what is universally important for deterring animal behavior is that the punishment occur parallel or quickly following the behavior. The association must be intuitive and salient for deterrence to occur for animals, and it’s only different among Civilized Man because he has been trained to constantly self-administer judgment of behavior so that cue-response rewards and punishments are artificially associated with the behavior in the mind. Taking a long time to arrest someone, or placing them on bail, is not sufficient punishment for animals if our intention is to change behavior. You can even ask them why they are being punished and they might say something approximately like “the government” or “racism” or “snitches”, ie they are mentally inculcating a pattern that is only going to produce more criminality in the future.

But in any case, it’s the fault of judges if they don’t follow the rules, not the fault of a given schema. Your 1909 quote is clearly about a specific category of crime that wasn’t considered serious at the time (hitting your wife).

But you need the reform and rehabilitation as well as the punishment, otherwise you are just throwing the person back into the same environment from which they came

Maybe I wasn’t clear in my post. You do not need any reform or rehab because animal behavior will 100% change provided a behavior is associated with punishment. That is the reform, that is the rehab. It’s how you learn not to touch hot things, not to be mean to others, and even to keep your King defended in Chess. Dog’s do not actually need reward-training to learn not to jump on the counter because you can just pinch their butt and shout, or quickly place them in a cage (if you are one of those progressives who mistakenly believes that isolation and boredom are less painful than brief physical pain). This is all very simple animal psychology that should be common knowledge and taught in schools. An animal can become traumatically afraid of walking on ice simply by falling into a frozen lake, no reform required (I sadly learned this from personal experience: my genetically-evolved Labrador never swam in her life because she escaped the yard and found her way on a frozen lake.)

Fewer slaps on the wrist

I say, many more physical slaps on the wrist for young criminality including poor school behavior, which progresses in adulthood to beatings (continued until morality improves).

We seem to have different notions of what a 'slap on the wrist' involves, but in my day we had corporal punishment in school and I agree that a good swipe of the báta wouldn't go amiss with some 😁

My 1909 example is not about the crime, it's about the expectation on the part of the citizen. "Look, a crime is being committed over here!" and expecting the cop to rush to the scene, while the cop knows the complaint won't be pursued (the wife won't bring a charge against her husband, Chesa Boudin when he was still there won't bring a prosecution) so he takes his time and strolls along leisurely, if he even bothers to go.

If the cops know that the wife-beater/crazy guy on the subway will be held and won't be out on bail within five minutes of being arrested, then they have an incentive to do the damn job. And that's on us, who vote in or support the guys who campaign on "I will stop the incarceration pipeline". Mind you, the "tough on crime" lot are not much better; it's no good being 'tough on crime' when the courts are backlogged and the jails are too full to hold the convicted, you need to put resources in there too.

But you need the reform and rehabilitation as well as the punishment, otherwise you are just throwing the person back into the same environment from which they came. People starting off with petty crime will continue on the path to more serious crime, the serious criminals will just take 'doing time' as part of the package.

What should be the purpose of the criminal justice system? You have given punishment & reform already, and I agree with you on those. But you left off isolation, we also need to keep dangerous people out of society. This is the "leviathan shaped hole in the discourse" that OP is refering to.

I think that hole exists because we have framed the discourse around the criminal, not society. Which is stupid, why should the discourse revolve around the 1% of people who do bad things? Whats best for society is really only considered through the reform lens - i.e. society benefits from reform as we dont have to spend $x to imprison and get $y from every successful reintegrated convict. When you leave out the leviathan lens you miss out on three strikes laws. The idea that "hey the vast majority of violent crime is done by people who have already done violent crime, we can just lock them up and isolate them and cut the occurrence in half." Or whatever large amount. The idea that the state could just uphold the law, actually send people to jail for their full terms, with the enhancements, and not let them out until theyre in their 50s and mostly too old to get into much trouble. The idea that we could actually do that, and in fact we have an obligation to do that. The law is what we legitametly and democratically agreed upon, we could just enforce it. And not have to deal with violent homeless people in the subway.

Additionally I think that there are some things humans naturally find disgusting, and that disgust is also a harm (in a lesser but similar way that assault is a harm), and I found the class I took on Rawls laughable because the professor a priori denied that a person has a right to not feel disgust while possessing a right to not be slapped.

Seems like a fully general argument against, for instance, freedom of speech? I can certainly find plenty of people who would honestly say that they find whatever you want to talk about to be disgusting, you could do the same for me.

But, more generally: I think there's a higher-level game-theoretic value to discouraging utility monsters.

'People shouldn't get slapped' is a pretty fair restriction. Slapping can cause real physical damage; direct physical pain from bodily assault is very universal negative utility that's very hard for people to ignore or overcome, and we wouldn't want them to generally lose that negative association anyway; and most importantly, a slap is specifically directed and targeted at a singular individual, giving that individual broader rights to object to it.

But if someone says 'I am disgusted by things I see in my environment, I have a right to demand they stop' then that's a pretty different thing. First of all because those are passive things not targeted at the individual, which they can avoid if they don't like them, and that have value to other people which they are trying to destroy. And second because while disgust is a universal human experience, the targets of disgust are not universal, and it's very likely the person in question could retrain away from that disgust if they wanted to (much more easily than someone could train to not feel pain when slapped).

Allowing someone's disgust at seeing something to be a moral imperative towards everyone else creates a perverse incentive for everyone to become as disgusted as possible at everything they oppose on any grounds. Not only is that a hugely dangerous weapon to hand people, it favors the creation of a society in which everyone is unhappy all the time because they have to be performatively disgusted by everything they oppose. Which also shifts all discussions and attempts to actually solve problems away from reason and towards emotional assaults.

So, basically: don't feed the utility monsters.

(and since I have some ability to predict the future: yes, this is an argument that can be deployed to validate rejecting trans people, I think that's a valid form of argument but not a strong one because of the different circumstances esp. around how targeted the request are)

The idea of freedom of speech developed in a period with strong indecency laws and “unsightly beggar ordinances”. For hundreds of years people were able to see the nuance between permissible expression and things that are disgusting. I am not saying “anything someone finds disgusting should be illegal”, and in fact no such law has ever existed, rather that what a reasonable person finds disgusting should not be done in public. This is how eg indecency laws operated. The rare case of contention over decency versus indecency does not invalidate the utility of the distinction in the 90% of applicable cases where a majority of reasonable persons concur. If we choose to ignore disgusting things you run the risk of causing serious harm (disgust) to reasonable people which in some cases can be worse than a slap.

I am not saying “anything someone finds disgusting should be illegal”, and in fact no such law has ever existed, rather that what a reasonable person finds disgusting should not be done in public. This is how eg indecency laws operated.

I think this is just wrong? Sodomy laws have certainly existed to outlaw things happening in private, for example. I'm pretty sure there have been banned books that it's not legal to own private copies of. To the extent that restrictions on pornography exist they've applied to private spaces. Etc.

At any rate: Yes, the public/private distinction is relevant, asking for things to be kept out of public spaces is being less of a utility monster than asking for them to be eradicated entirely. Although the modern world has complicated that distinction profoundly; are social media sites public or private? If you do something in a private space that gets recorded and then broadcast in public (maybe by an enemy), was the thing itself ok? Is Netflix or Cartoon Network 'public'? There's a lot of room to stretch the definition of 'in public' into every corner of our private lives, which seems to be the tact used whenever you allow 'disgust' as a policy-relevant factor for people to manipulate.

But you're also ignoring one of my central points here:

If we choose to ignore disgusting things you run the risk of causing serious harm (disgust) to reasonable people which in some cases can be worse than a slap.

You're still reifying 'disgusting things' as if that were an ontologically basic category, rather than a subjective individual judgement which is contingent on culture and upbringing and which people can train themselves into or out of or just lie about.

If you think being gay is a sin and should be illegal, I can point at separation of church and state and tell you to screw off. If you say that gay people are disgusting and you shouldn't be forced to see them holding hands in public, suddenly you've appropriated the power to take away their rights to act normally and be regular people across huge swaths of daily life, plus all the other knock-on effects of making things invisible and hidden.

And again, the point is that 'disgust at seeing gay people holding hands' is not a universal or primitive qualia the way 'pain at being slapped' is. You can train yourself into or out of it, culturally if not individually, which means that allowing it to be a factor in forming policy turns it into a weapon that you're incentivized to encourage.

We could be deterring so much more crime by simply beating criminals immediately if sufficient evidence is obvious, or at the very least throwing them in a cell without food for 30 hours (the walls decorated with the psychological cues of their crime). This is actually vastly better for the criminal who hopefully develops a minor trauma response when considering criminality in the future.

this already happens. if there is probable cause the criminal is arrested and detained until arraigned

I do believe that we feed them and do not yet adorn their walls with the the signs of their crime.

This actually intersects with an effortpost I am thinking of making here. Consider this a trailer. This summer[1], one man ...

My military[2] and math friend, have you considered that you also have a hole in your perception? You're a man of reason, a man of action, prone to quotes involving rough men in standing ready in the night[3], and that viewpoint comes with its own obscured terrain.

One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.

To quote a great American philosopher[4], we're halfway there.

You think there's a Leviathan-shaped hole in their reasoning. They say that Penny should have subjugated to the omnipresent Leviathan - but if so, you retort, shouldn't Neely also subject himself? That Neely acted the way he did proves there is no Leviathan, therefore Penny isn't obligated to subject himself to the non-existent.

To the Blue Tribe, there is a Leviathan: the socio-emotional consensus. It surrounds us and penetrates us, binding us. Another poster here said that for some people, the social-emotional consensus is more real than gravity. You're a tough-minded man of reason, and you don't think it matters, but to the Blue Tribe, we've got each other, and that's a lot[5].

You probably noticed after that unfortunate subway incident that left-wing reddit was quick to say "We failed Jordan Neely", and if you understand that statement, you understand the Blue Tribe. To the Blue Tribe, Jordan Neely acted the way he did because the group failed to include and empathize with him. Penny is a murderer not because he killed Neely, but because he acted without the consent and validation of the group. Tutto nello feelz, niente al di fuori dello feelz, nulla contro lo feelz

From the Blue Tribe point of view, yes, HlynkaCG, there is a Leviathan Claus, and if we all believe in him, then he is real.

[1] Hopefully not so late, but we'll see depending on the reception to this post

[2] How do you know HlynkaCG served in the military? He tells you.

[3] Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[4] Bon Jovi, J., 1986

[5] ibid

You probably noticed after that unfortunate subway incident that left-wing reddit was quick to say "We failed Jordan Neely", and if you understand that statement, you understand the Blue Tribe. To the Blue Tribe, Jordan Neely acted the way he did because the group failed to include and empathize with him. Penny is a murderer not because he killed Neely, but because he acted without the consent and validation of the group. Tutto nello feelz, niente al di fuori dello feelz, nulla contro lo feelz

I understand that they think this way, but I think that it represents a hole in the Blue Tribe thinking. They, or rather this segment of them, believe with a religious fervor that they have the solution to all societal ills. They believe that their ideology covers all cases of everything, so nobody will ever feel compelled to do anything bad once everything they want is implemented.

I call it the Theory Of Nice. It's the belief that Niceness Fixes Everything. The root cause of all hostility and meanness is that somebody else at some other time was not sufficiently Nice to that person. If anyone is being mean, we can cure them by being exclusively nice to them for a sufficiently long time. We can construct a world where nobody is ever mean to anybody, therefore there's no source for meanness to start from, and everybody will just be nice to everybody else all the time. Any time somebody of the Ingroup is mean to other people in a manner severe enough to require some form of suppression, the real meaning is that we failed that person by not being sufficiently nice to them earlier, because if we had done so, obviously they would never have done that. They're our Ingroup after all, so it's not possible that they're just inherently bad.

Meanwhile, everyone in our Outgroup, i.e. Red Team, or people who don't just accept our assertions that our ideology will fix everything, is just incorrigibly evil. They're brainwashed monsters, all hatred against them is justified, any measure against them, no matter how harsh or mean, is acceptable. Obviously doing any of those things doesn't make us mean or corrupt us in any way. Don't you understand, they're the Outgroup? It's different for them! It's just different, that's all!

I think any ideology that purports to fix the world and be the one solution to everything must account for everything and everyone everywhere, and do so provably. You can't just hand-wave away that this person wouldn't act bad if we did things my way. You'd have to demonstrate in practice that it actually does handle every single case in the promised way, no exceptions. And you can't dismiss some other group that is clearly your Outgroup as unfixably evil. If you do those things, you don't actually have a glorious new ideology that fixes the world, you just have plain old Ingroup-bias, the exact same stuff that's been in our hindbrains for millennia and powered countless atrocities around the world.

To the Blue Tribe, there is a Leviathan: the socio-emotional consensus.

Oh, I too believe in the social contract, but I think the 'emotional' part above is doing the majority of the work for the Blue Tribe version. I'm more in the vein of this way it works out, from "The Ball and the Cross":

He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the manager of a restaurant. That is, he spoke with rattling and breathless rapidity, but with no incoherence, and therefore with no emotion. It was a steady, monotonous vivacity, which came not seemingly from passion, but merely from the reason having been sent off at a gallop. He was saying something like this:

“You refuse me my half-bottle of Medoc, the drink the most wholesome and the most customary. You refuse me the company and obedience of my daughter, which Nature herself indicates. You refuse me the beef and mutton, without pretence that it is a fast of the Church. You now forbid me the promenade, a thing necessary to a person of my age. It is useless to tell me that you do all this by law. Law rests upon the social contract. If the citizen finds himself despoiled of such pleasures and powers as he would have had even in the savage state, the social contract is annulled.”

“It's no good chattering away, Monsieur,” said Hutton, for the Master was silent. “The place is covered with machine-guns. We've got to obey our orders, and so have you.”

“The machinery is of the most perfect,” assented Durand, somewhat irrelevantly; “worked by petroleum, I believe. I only ask you to admit that if such things fall below the comfort of barbarism, the social contract is annulled. It is a pretty little point of theory.”

“Oh! I dare say,” said Hutton.

Durand bowed quite civilly and withdrew.

…“The place is on fire!” cried Quayle with a scream of indecent terror. “Oh, who can have done it? How can it have happened?”

A light had come into Turnbull's eyes. “How did the French Revolution happen?” he asked.

“Oh, how should I know!” wailed the other.

“Then I will tell you,” said Turnbull; “it happened because some people fancied that a French grocer was as respectable as he looked.”

Even as he spoke, as if by confirmation, old Mr. Durand re-entered the smoky room quite placidly, wiping the petroleum from his hands with a handkerchief. He had set fire to the building in accordance with the strict principles of the social contract.

You probably noticed after that unfortunate subway incident that left-wing reddit was quick to say "We failed Jordan Neely", and if you understand that statement, you understand the Blue Tribe.

Yes, society did fail him, by letting the "emotional" side of the "socio-emotional consensus" do all the work and so he could not be arrested, because that is police brutality, nor committed to a hospital, because One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but he could be left to sink further into sickness and violence until the eventual end came as it did.

You probably noticed after that unfortunate subway incident that left-wing reddit was quick to say "We failed Jordan Neely", and if you understand that statement, you understand the Blue Tribe. To the Blue Tribe, Jordan Neely acted the way he did because the group failed to include and empathize with him. Penny is a murderer not because he killed Neely, but because he acted without the consent and validation of the group. Tutto nello feelz, niente al di fuori dello feelz, nulla contro lo feelz

from what I recall, to the blue tribe, Neely was murdered by a vigilante. It was not a matter of society having failed him. I don't think the debate, what little was actually debated beyond people shouting past each other, was framed as a collective failing of society.

So riddle me this; why did they not fail Daniel penny just as hard?

Does everyone have an obligation to let schizos randomly attack them?

Does everyone have an obligation to let schizos randomly attack them?

YES. That the sovereign is insane doesn't make him not the sovereign, and that is what he has decreed. Now, he's not entirely unreasonable... once the schizo has actually started the attack, you may defend yourself with "proportionate" force.

ETA: I'm going to go even further and note that the #1 effective rule of today's sovereigns is "no self help". If someone threatens or attacks or robs or even defrauds you, and you just let it go, you will almost always be in a better position than if you do anything else. Because it's the dispute that attracts the sovereign's attention. And the sovereign really doesn't want to be involved in settling the petty disputes of his inferiors. So to deter this, he makes sure that if his attention is attracted, BOTH parties will be significantly worse off than if it wasn't.

Nitpick re. [2], I think the formula you're looking for is:

"How can you tell Joe served in the Army?"

"Don't worry, he'll tell you."

Seems to me it is just racism. Compare Floyd and Timpa. If colors of Perry and/or Neely were different, this isn’t a story.

I often think of liberalism as a bell jar: since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is essentially no competing world view that people in the west are exposed to. Everyone they meet are some kind of liberal. Liberals call each other "liberals" as an insult. The "communists" are really liberals, the "alt-right" are really liberals, when you scratch beneath whatever surface label they've applied to themselves all you find is a liberal. On the one hand this is a reflection of the blinding success of liberalism but also has resulted in a significant weakening of liberalism as an effective mode of governance.

To treat liberalism as an inevitable endpoint, or a universal truth, or some manifestation of the underlying laws of the universe; it undermines what made liberalism triumphant and successful.

Edit: Meant this as a direct reply to @HlynkaCG.

I think the bit you are missing is that the liberal western order is itself a solution to the Hobbes position. Rather than an authoritarian regime, it turns out, if you convince everyone that everyone else is actually a good person, and create a whole strata of social pressures and reinforcements, if you create that illusion so convincing so that you treat people that way...then you can have a bunch of red in tooth and claw apes crammed into close proximity...and almost all of them end up not trying to murder each other.

Far from looking at the weakness of the liberal order, consider its triumph. There is a reason people want to move to the liberal world, because the illusion actually creates a better place.

If you think that Hobbes was right about fundamental human nature then the liberal world order is an astonishing accomplishment. It has successfully pushed the violent to the fringes. Millions upon millions of animals are packed like sardines into tiny metal boxes every day and DO NOT kill each other!

Now yes, it does then struggle to deal with those fringes, because the whole illusion hinges on people essentially believing everyone is decent. But that is a much smaller problem than much less successful places. I've been to Nairobi and Pakistan and China and the liberal order is significantly better.

You're focussing on the Leviathan shaped hole, without noticing how tiny it is compared to what Hobbes would predict. Significantly more freedom than the authoritarian feudal sovereigns he envisaged would be needed to control humanities base impulses.A place where most people act as if a sovereign has presence even when it doesn't. Where large numbers of them obey traffic lights even when no-one else is around! Human nature tamed by human socialization.

The Liberal civilizational illusion is a triumph of order over chaos. An order created primarily by social behaviors and a great lie. A lie that becomes truth when we believe it to be true. An emergent system that has outcompeted every rival. Communism? Wrecked. Feudalism? Imploded. Libertarianism? Can't even get a foothold.

And you are quibbling over how it has not been 100% successful in controlling human nature? Thats like complaining your football team won 42-7, because they let a single touchdown in. Sure its not perfect, but it is very close!

To restate in your example, the whole reason you can have hundreds of people in tight proximity in a tiny metal tube and that only a random schizophrenic causes trouble is because of how utterly brilliant the liberal order is. You don't notice all the things it prevents, because they didn't happen in the first place.

Correct me at will, but it doesn't look to me like liberalism outcompeted other forms of social organization because of its ability to discourage violence. Would write more but phoneposting.

Its ability to encourage cooperative behaviors and discourage violence, without the near omnipresent sovereign authoritarian presence Hobbes thought would be necessary. As per OP's point the sovereign did not act to stop the schizophrenic because they had no presence on the train.

But if Hobbes is correct the real miracle then is that trains are not full of mayhem every day.

Liberalism can harness that power with less crushing oversight and state violence. Which empowers its nations to excel.

I imagine there were more than a few Germans who were born and remembered life under monarchy in the German Empire. Then they witnessed the fall of the monarchy and transformation to a Republic after the abdication in 1918. They lived in the Weimar Republic and witnessed the fall of the Republic to a fascist government under Hitler. Then the fall of National Socialism to a Communist government. And then the fall of Communism to a liberal Democracy. You have to wonder the cynicism that ideological thrashing would build into a person, and the gullibility of the people who truly believe "finally, we have reached the Truthful Solution."

Liberalism is only successful because its adherents truly believe in it and cannot imagine anything else. The second it's regarded as anything other than an inevitable endpoint, or universal truth, is when it is going to fail.

Liberalism is only successful because its adherents truly believe in it and cannot imagine anything else. The second it's regarded as anything other than an inevitable endpoint, or universal truth, is when it is going to fail.

I think you underestimate the strength of liberalism. In the darkest days of 1940-41 when it was Britain alone against Germany, many were happy to write it off as an annoyingly obstinate but ultimately dead ideology. Yet the liberal democracies ended up thrashing the autocracies; not only crushing them under the weight of the combined outputs of the arsenals of democracy but ultimately converting them as well.

Perhaps liberalism will wither and decay. Perhaps some other, superior, more evolutionarily fit ideology will take its place. But I'm not betting against it just yet.

Liberalism made an alliance with Communism to make that happen. Something which both liberals and communists like to gloss over.

The communists needed the liberals much more than the other way around. If the western allies had refused to help the Soviets at all and the Germans beat them, Berlin and Hamburg and Frankfurt are still piles of radioactive ash come September 1945.

If the Western Allies had refused to ally with the Soviet Union, there would have been no war between Germany and Western Europe. Instead, Europe was destroyed and Great Britain lost its empire. Liberalism's greatest victory entailed the destruction of Europe, the collapse of the British Empire, and the Communist conquest of half of Europe. All to "save Poland" by the way.

If the Western Allies had refused to ally with the Soviet Union, there would have been no war between Germany and Western Europe.

I cannot fathom what you mean by this. Like I cannot tell if you are being deliberately dishonest or if you have a perplexing, gigantic gap of knowledge. Who was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact signed by? Who made a deal split Poland, and all Eastern Europe? Who was allied right up until the point tanks began crossing the border on June 22 1941? Because it sure as shit wasn't the western allies and the Soviets.

Hitler genuinely lobbied for the Western Allies to join him in his war against the Soviet Union, or at least to remain neutral. If they had remained neutral then Germany would not have gone to war against Western Europe.

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You are aware that war broke out between Britain and Germany before the USSR’s formal alliance with Germany was broken?

"War broke out", you mean Great Britain declared war on Germany right?

The second in command of Germany, Rudolf Hess, actually boarded a plane, flew to Great Britain, strapped on a parachute for the first time in his life and bailed out of the plane to try to go around Churchill and make contact with Britain's peace factions:

... Hess was tasked to "use all means at his disposal to achieve, if not a German military alliance with England against Russia, at least the neutralization of England."

So how does war between Britain and Germany "break out" if Britain and France don't declare war on Germany, or if they make peace with Germany and remain neutral during the Soviet war?

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To treat liberalism as an inevitable endpoint, or a universal truth, or some manifestation of the underlying laws of the universe; it undermines what made liberalism triumphant and successful.

What does this mean?

The connections of liberalism and communism is a more real phenomenon than the altright being liberal. Although it is true that some dissident rightists are in part of a certain kind of liberal.

But of a different type than modern liberalism which is part of the new left and has stronger cultural marxist dna.

here is a thoughtful discussion about liberalism that raises the issue of how it relates to communism.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=j2AFw6EW1bw

In regards to the success of liberalism it does have to do with a heavy dose of authoritarianism, and dogmatic adherence.

And authoritarianism for progressivism of what is the current trend. Just as USSR was considered the dictatorship of progressivism, modern liberal democracy fits within that paradigm increasingly but of what is the current version of progressivism.

People like Fukuyama have been defending all sorts of authoritarian moves. Modern liberal tribe is not the tribe of Greenwald.

To the extend that liberalism is about neutrality of institutions, a free marketplace of ideas, respect of rule of law, equal and consistent application of rule of law or even liberal nationalism and national self determination, or respecting freedom of assocation/speech in the fundamental degree, seeing oppositional politics where the right wing opposition is allowed to exist, all that has been eroded.

To the extend that it is about opposing corruption and capture of power by ethnic lobbies, or big weapon manufacturers (some of the biggest donors of thinktanks), or intelligence agencies, or neocon families as permanent bureocrat aristocracy, again we see a failure.

To the extend it is about disempowring warmongers whose actions are against international law, again we see that modern liberals as a tribe are failing.

Of course the reality is that from the very existence of the French revolution there have always been a significant element of extremism. And the problem of the dominant ideology of a society leading to fundamentalist extremism and theocratic totalitarian society is also at play, and involves more than just liberalism.

My conclusion is the ideological fanaticism for progress and liberalism leads to an ideology that is destructive and even erodes some of the possible virtues associated with liberalism. But this association like any religion that promises utopia and associates itself with goodness is something that true believers promote. But the whole concept is motte and bailey at its substance, for part of the success have been discrimination against non liberals, and also associating with liberalism the warmongering imperialists, the racist supremacist ethnic lobbies, the authoritarian Saul Alinsky fans (such as Hilary Clinton), or those who collaborate with people like Bill Ayers.

The mixture of some restrained liberalism with conservatism and nationalism works better but has failed to gatekeep and stop the more far left faction.

While liberalism as an ideology is flawed but some part of it in combination of non liberal tradition, can create something that works better in combination than any other element in isolation, the tribe of liberals is different. They fit within what I criticize more so than ever before. While in the past in addition to more new left types, some people who called themselves liberal, might have fitted more in line with a more moderate syncretic tradition, this is hardly the case with today mainstream liberalism. Ironically, the marginalization of liberal tribe in favor of those of a more syncretic tradition would also lead to a society that does succeed more (but never absolutely as they are utopian and flawed) in some of the promises of liberalism I mentioned that modern liberalism completely fails at.

But this was also the case historically. The counter revolutionaries promoted better functioning and freer societies than the radicals of French revolution. East European countries that blacklisted communists and had an ideology that combined conservative, traditional, liberal elements worked better than the current cultural marxist new left paradigm or the communist one.

While there is some value to aspects of liberalism and the correct response to throw the dirty bathwater without the baby, the ideology of what happens as liberalism purity spirals and is called liberalism still or "liberal democracy" or "peoples democracy" deserves no preservation but to be thrown to the dustbin. While many of the people who became aligned with modern liberalism due to the reasons I mentioned in the first part of the post will join the new reigning ideology if the new left/cultural marxist/modern liberalism starts losing influence. Even with all the institutional capture there is still sizable backlash, precisely because it doesn't work well. Where people of the tradition I favor, appoint likeminded people in positions of power this works to promote an ideology more in line with that. For example Orban and Hungary. The issue now is that the new left/modern liberal types are acting more aggressively worldwide and have captured significant power in the USA.

But it isn't a done deal and there is nothing inevitable or unique here that is different to any historical examples people who are loyal to X or Y ideology/religious sect being possible for them to either capture power, or fail to do so, based on the circumstances. It does seem that messianic thinking helps movements to capture power. Specifically the part that is about the movement bringing the world at the stage of utopian end of history and bringing forth the messianic age where people are saved. Although liberalism seems to have multiple figures and the ideology in general as the messiah, and also larger groups as the bringer of salvation, rather than one central figure. With the liberals themselves and various intersectional groups as the Messiahs and redeemers.

I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool and in that I never really thought of myself as being particularly intelligent.

raises hand for also being non-college, not particularly smart or capable, and firmly stuck in lower middle-class pink collar jobs - no, I do not have a 'career' or any sniff of one, so you're not the sole instance at least

The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.

There's a guy over on ACX with whom I am having a (courteous! but frank!) exchange of views on "atheists need ecstasy" (and no he doesn't mean this but rather mysticism in a secular dress).

It's an interesting post on his own blog and I vehemently disagree with the thrust of it - that you can tidily snip away the religious nonsense and have a Gosh Wow Cosmic Sensawunda I Effin' LOVE Science secular remainder, but he's at least trying to address the dry and sterile atheist (of some sections of the project) viewpoint towards what you instance here.

As for the rest of it, I'm not a Hobbesian but yeah. Original Sin, there's a reason this was a winning concept. We're not lovely kind-hearted bonobos (has the bononbo ideal society thing been busted yet? I vaguely remember a while back there was some re-assessment that not everything in their society was as rosy as presented), we're flawed and fallen beings, and violence, greed, illness, and general "ugh someone should do something about all this" are part of that. I don't know the ins and outs of the Neely case, but someone in the throes of a schizophrenic breakdown can't be reasoned with or talked down from their delusions. I am not saying 'strangle the homeless to death' but again, I agree that this is the strawman that is leapt to as a misrepresentation of one's views if there is any deviation once the narrative has been set about the powerless, the privileged, and 'social workers not cops'.

Accordingly it becomes difficult to ignore just how much of liberal society (or what Scott would call "the Universal Culture") is predicated on assumptions that do not necessarily hold.

If I'm being bitchy about it (surely not you, FarNearEverywhere!), then there's a ton that they assume and don't recognise comes from being brought up in circumstances where there weren't worries about paying bills, sorry we can't afford a new pair of shoes this week so keep wearing the ones with the hole in the sole, and the rest of it; where college and a professional career were the natural path in life; where everyone was nice and you talked things out and nobody you knew ever got into a fistfight or had been attacked in the streets. It's that saying about fish and water. If they fall into the right age range and get the lectures about White Privilege, they may repeat such things, but deep down they don't really understand it, their notion is "well I'm white which means I benefit from systemic racism at large in society" and think about their privilege vis-à-vis the BIPOC and LGBT+ minorities, but they don't think about their privilege vis-à-vis "when I was a kid, I never even had to be aware of the cost of the grocery bills and certainly the store owner never came to our house to warn us about running up a tab and we needed to pay it off or else".

I'm having a bit of trouble following this.

I did, in fact, read Leviathan and participate in a discussion group about it, but don't remember all that much about it. It seems obviously true that it's better to live in a society with basically functional norms and consequences around interactions between individuals, groups, and governments than not. And that there are a lot of examples of what that "not" looks like, and they can get really bad.

Present day America certainly is inculturating a social norm that some people might act extremely unpleasant in public, and everyone else needs to politely ignore that unless they are actively harming someone (or maybe not then depending on the kind of harm). Public schools actively cultivate this dynamic from the earliest years with the way they integrate the very least integratabtle special education children, by letting them scream and bite in the name of "inclusion" (though there are limits on the amount of biting and scratching that is tolerable, since they don't want to lose staff constantly), rather than letting them have quiet, privacy and space, whether or not they would prefer that (the screaming, biting ones certainly do look like they might prefer it), and no matter the cost. There's certainly an argument to be made that this is bad.

On the other hand, violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is obviously not the default. Warring clans might be the default. Subways are not the default. Millions of strangers all peacefully taking public transportation to their cubicles every day, ignoring the one crazy person screaming threats is absolutely the opposite of a default way of managing society. It is a wonder of civilization. The default, given the possibility of a hundred million people cooperating and a few defectors, might then be to hang or exile the defectors. But we are generally so secure (And in general we are! That's precisely why almost everyone just ignores the screaming crazy person, because it so rarely escalates to violence) that we're tending toward complacency which, yeah, is probably a mistake.

Can things break down surprisingly quickly and violently? Yes. Liberals probably know that? Apart from actual wars, they do know about things like gang violence in cities, even very wealthy cities, even with tons of various expensive "programs." Just, maybe they will say that it isn't done right, or isn't enough, rather than saying that the neighborhood has degenerated into a state of nature and needs to be civilized by force. But the liberals have a bit of a point, in that when the US government tries to civilize by force, it has often done a terrible job of it.

I spent some time living with a Albanian family in Kosovo. They had been shelled during the war, then mostly rebuilt, though a co-worker mentioned several times that he was concerned that they used to have a lot more cows, herds of cows they would lead through the fields, and now they only had a few, and he interpreted that as poverty and dysfunction. I have never had any cows, and they do seem like a very tough culture, optimized for toughness and not getting swallowed up by the surrounding civilizations, no matter how many sons had to go serve as janissaries through the years. But America can and does swallow them and everyone else up anyway, because that's what we're optimized for. Conservative Americans seem to think this is a fair trade, since we're all much better off materially in America. I'm unsure what the conservative Albanians think, other than that they like and are attached to their cows, flia, clothing, fields, and everything else.

That was unusually rambling, because, again, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. Perhaps my own social milieu is too much of a mix of conservatives, liberals, people underwriting Dreamer loans, people who have had to change jobs because their workplace suddenly started operating entirely in Spanish with the thermostat at 90 degrees, people who have read Hobbs, and people who milk goats to notice?

Did Neely actually violently attack anyone? From the wiki article it sounds like he was just screaming at people and disturbing the peace. Perhaps he deserved to get roughed up for that, but getting killed seems a bit of a reach.

getting killed seems a bit of a reach

Shortening the description of what happened like this IMO really does a disservice to understanding the incident. At no point did anybody, Penny included, set out to kill Neely. No weapons that were not appropriate to the situation were deployed. No physical techniques that were not reasonable considering what was happening were used. He was merely physically restrained for a brief period to make him stop doing whatever it exactly was that he was doing. This was highly likely to have been reasonable and appropriate. That he died from it is an unintended consequence, most likely due to him being in comprehensively terrible health.

The class of people that Neely represents has wildly different health than anything most regular people can conceive of. Which touches back to the giant hole concept that HlynkaCG was talking about. These people start out severely mentally ill, the type that would likely be institutionalized for life in another era. They do lots of illegal drugs, not checked at all for purity or cleanliness. Possibly including injected with dirty needles. They probably sleep on the streets somewhere most of the time. Constantly in and out of jail and hospitals. You can bet they never follow up on any health or legal suggestions offered in those places. Eating whatever comes to hand, no thought to it being clean or healthy.

I know there are legal doctrines covering this sort of thing, which I'm not meaning to debate right now. But morally speaking, exactly what responsibility do we have to this sort of person? If you're both so crazy that you're antagonizing and scaring people on a train, and also so unhealthy and fragile that a brief period of mild restraint is at risk of killing you, then what exactly do we do with you? I have a hard time feeling like society has any responsibility towards such a person.

It sounds like the chokehold lasted for some time after Neely passed out, though it’s unclear exactly how long, so I wouldn’t say Neely was obviously uncharacteristically fragile. But fair enough, it was not the greatest loss to society, as callous as that may be to say.

He was choked. estimates vary between 6-15 minutes which could easily be fatal if his airway was constricted.

Do you have a source for this? There's video of him still breathing after he was released. I'm not aware of any witnesses or video that reliably puts the chokehold time at 6-15 minutes. Exactly who made that "estimate" and based on what?

Considering the normal timing of NYC subways, usually 1 to 2 minutes between stops, it would be extremely strange for someone to be in a chokehold for "6-15 minutes".

From the wiki article it sounds like he was just screaming at people and disturbing the peace.

That's part of the problem: oh, he's just screaming and threatening, ignore it. We can't have him arrested and taken off the train, that would be intolerable racist prejudice. We can't deal with these kinds of disturbances as they used to be dealt with in the past, so just accept the new consensus of Bike Cuck(a dreadful term, but the best example of the mindset). Only losers take the bus, or the subway, anyway so it's not like anyone important is inconvenienced by mentally ill people roaming around with the possibility of becoming violent. Really, you should be cycling or walking everywhere instead of using public transport, reduce your carbon footprint! It's your fault for being in a confined space you can't get out of, with a crazy person who might decide they want to rip your face off because they don't like the colour of your jacket!

No, that doesn't warrant being killed. But neither does it warrant the ordinary people on the subway being subjected to this 'disturbing the peace' as the new normal, either.

I’m not sure what your point is. It seems we agree that the legal system is too lax on shitty mentally ill people, and we also agree that this doesn’t justify vigilante violence going too far?

I’m not sure what your point is. It seems we agree that the legal system is too lax on shitty mentally ill people, and we also agree that this doesn’t justify vigilante violence going too far?

Taking these two statements together results in "The legal system will allow mentally ill people to menace others, and they may do nothing but stand there and take it". If the legal system doesn't deal with these menaces, and doesn't allow others to deal with it, it is in all practical effect putting the full force of the state behind the menace.

The more the king is perceived as a tyrant instead of a font of justice, the less the 95 IQ masses cooperate voluntarily, and the less voluntary cooperation the weaker the social contract is. The sovereign doesn’t have a panoptic iron hand because of his telepathic powers; he rules because men obey him.

Yes, he rules because men obey him. But obviously only some men will obey him voluntarily. As long as he has enough of those, the rest don't matter. He can choose to enforce an order where thieves and violent people are kept down and the other people are left to go about their business in peace. Or he can choose to enforce an order where the thieves and violent people are given significant leeway and the others are left in fear of them on the one hand and the sovereign on the other. Either way works, as long as his cops and soldiers are willing to stick with him.

The second way, arguably, works even better -- unlike the thieves and violent people, the ordinary people will stay on the side of the sovereign even when the sovereign works against them, because they believe in such things as the sovereign's legitimacy. Tell a thug that he's forbidden from violently defending himself from threats because he might get it wrong and his attacker's life is worth at least as much as his, and he'll laugh and maybe stab you. Tell an ordinary citizen that and (we know, because it has already happened, and in fact the previous incarnation of this board schismed over exactly this) he'll consider it and quite likely accept it. Of course the cops, being cut from a similar sort of cloth (if a somewhat finer weave) as the thugs, won't accept it... but they get an exemption.

I think so, but mostly wonder why this was the main concrete example from the OP, since in a Hobbesian state of nature the worrying crazy person would have died of any number of things long before that point. I feel like it might be just throwing me off, but am not sure, since I don’t really understand what he’s getting at.

The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.

This is the topic of The Righteous Mind and Moral Foundations Theory, which suggests that people have Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values. Liberals are more sensitive to Care and Fairness, whereas conservatives equally mix all five. Thus Haidt suggests a blind spot where liberals can struggle to understand conservatives when they make a judgement on the basis of Loyalty, Authority or Sanctity, but conservatives are still able to understand liberals when they make a judgement on Care or Fairness.

On the other hand I disagree with that. Liberals do still have those values in there, and can express them just as strongly if not stronger than Conservatives. They just need an unusual nudge to do so. Covid was one of those moments where Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values dominated Liberal moral decisionmaking.

On the other hand I disagree with that. Liberals do still have those values in there, and can express them just as strongly if not stronger than Conservatives. They just need an unusual nudge to do so. Covid was one of those moments where Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values dominated Liberal moral decisionmaking.

I'm inclined to agree with this. I actually see a lot of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity in progressive politics, but it tends to come out in strange and indirect ways. These moral foundations often manifest like Freudian neuroses; they are seemingly repressed but then force their way through in ways that are often unconscious, perverted and vicarious.

I think Haidt is onto something, but his error is that modern progressives are psychologically more like old conservatives, except they have been raised in a tradition of progressivism. Older progressives were a self-selecting group of outliers, but modern progressives are just normies who grew up with that stuff. In any case, the upshot is that old fashioned expressions of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity have been tabooed. Essentially, the tenets of the progressive faith are all couched in the principles of Care and Fairness, and so when the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations bubble up to the surface, they do so dressed up in a guise of Care and Fairness. This is why modern progressivism seems to be taking on more a religious flavor, and it's often reinventing old customs but using new language to legitimize them.

They certainly have Authority ("It's not my job to educate you" and the whole attitude of acting like there's already a huge consensus behind them that they can't believe you aren't aware of, what's wrong with you) and Sanctity (observe the frequent use of "Gross" as a term of moral criticism, often meaning nothing more than that someone disagreed with some prog shibboleth).

Loyalty is a weird one. There is an intense loyalty to the movement, and an expectation of same (e.g. exhorting people to be "good allies"), paired with a near-total lack thereof toward any of the individuals that make it up. I was particularly struck by this in their treatment of Germaine Greer. This attitude seems weird and almost incoherent to me - what is the movement besides a useful shorthand for the people who make it up? - but apparently they have no difficulty squaring that circle. Their whole shtick is reifying/anthropomorphizing abstract group identities in ways that seem weird and unhealthy to me, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.

You're not wrong in the general sense that each Tribe had cultural perspectives that are invisible to the other, and probably that the Blue Tribe's limitations there are smaller given the overwhelming cultural dominance of the Blue Tribe. ((That said, I'm not sure these gaps are as complete as people think: go to weird places and you'll find people who touch both spheres. It's just that the movers and shakers aren't.))

But your example seems weird:

One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.

This is absolutely something liberals and the Blue Tribe have as a perspective, and indeed even the most ivory-towered of them will fairly consistently blame conservatives for 'not grappling' with it in a genuine way rather than just shoving it out-of-sight. They just believe that the Correct solutions are near-completely opposite from the Red Tribe ones: favoring Therapy and voluntary treatment for the literal-schizophrenics and improved material support for the non-clinically insane. I think these things are wrong, but they're not really a gap in awareness, just evaluation of information.

This is absolutely something liberals and the Blue Tribe have as a perspective, and indeed even the most ivory-towered of them will fairly consistently blame conservatives for 'not grappling' with it in a genuine way rather than just shoving it out-of-sight. They just believe that the Correct solutions are near-completely opposite from the Red Tribe ones: favoring Therapy and voluntary treatment for the literal-schizophrenics and improved material support for the non-clinically insane.

I actually think this proves Hlynka's point. Liberals don't believe violent schizophrenics on the train are an underlying state of nature we'll always have to deal with, they believe its caused by a lack of therapy or support, and with enough support, we can live in a world where there are zero violent schizophrenics on the trains.

I actually think this proves Hlynka's point. Liberals don't believe violent schizophrenics on the train are an underlying state of nature we'll always have to deal with, they believe its caused by a lack of therapy or support, and with enough support, we can live in a world where there are zero violent schizophrenics on the trains.

They're both wrong. Violent schizophrenics on the train are a result of the sovereign's policies -- including policies of providing support.

I do not believe that I have ever encountered even one violent schizophrenic on the train, in my life, almost 40 years. There are a handful of cases where I've encountered some sort of an obviously insane ranter - cannot diagnose them further than that, of course - in some form of public transport, usually the bus, but as said, these have been only a handful of cases, and they haven't been violent. I can't even recall any of my friends talking about such cases, apart from Americans, of course. That might indicate there's, indeed, some way to make violent schizophrenics on the train something other than a state of nature we'll always have to deal with, whatever it is.

I think quite a few Hobbesian social conservatives think that violent schizophrenics should be institutionalized well before they're at the points we see them as violent or schizophrenics in the modern sense, and with enough throwing them into loony bins, we can live in a world where the are zero or near-zero. Like, I interacted with Clayton Cramer on this topic back when he was writing My Brother Ron (albeit more in regards to Bellesiades), and while that wasn't all of his position, it was a pretty sizable portion of it.

There are more narrow versions of this claim that are meaningful -- only Red Tribers believe this can only be resolved by armed police, or realize that some portion likes to hurt not because of the deserving-target's pain but for the feel of blood on their fingers -- but their narrowness turns them into policy matters.

They just believe that the Correct solutions are near-completely opposite from the Red Tribe ones: favoring Therapy and voluntary treatment for the literal-schizophrenics and improved material support for the non-clinically insane. I think these things are wrong, but they're not really a gap in awareness, just evaluation of information.

This is not a point in their favor. Believing this at the start of the project is one thing. But that particular project has been going on for decades now, and anyone still believing it works is operating from profound willful ignorance of the actual results (both in general, and in the specific case of Jordan Neely), or a faith unshakeable by evidence.

With a few quibbles (cfe "immigration" here), I'd probably agree with you.

But it still means that talking about how we absolutely must handle and solve the problem of schizophrenics will get them to happily nod, think you agree with them, and then turn right back to Housing First arguments.

The standard Blue Tribe perspective is not that this is the default, but that this is somehow the fault of society/capitalism/racism or something else. That these people are victims of their environment, and therefore are owed welfare as compensation. That if they're causing problems it's our fault and therefore our duty to fix their problems.

Not that they are inherently violent schizos by default and welfare is a useful way to suppress their violent tendencies, that's a utilitarian center-right position, and a fairly uncommon one (though one I partly hold, though I'd like to see more emphasis on mental health treatment and less on enabling.)

I think Red Tribers believing that some people are inherent violent schizos is a stronger claim, but it's a different one from "violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways".

((And even that runs into framing problems. There are people that think capitalism causes literally every case of schizophrenia, but the more common take among liberals and even some leftist is more the Ozy mealy-mouthed 'they're bad unless 'supported''.))

  • This is where the hole comes in. My position is that the secular liberal dominiation of academia has effectively castrated our society's ablility to discuss certain topics in a reasonable manner by baking liberal assumptions about how the world ought to work (rather than how it actually does work) into the vocabulary of the discussion.

The recent post-Musk surge of the HBD-left after such ideas were unshackled by the threat of censorship by the old owners, is evidence that at least some on the center or center-left are willing to confront these harsh truths--not just about IQ but also crime stats. Many of these people also agree with you on the innocence of Daniel Penny. On this community, by my estimate, most people here at least are on the side of Penny. I don't think it logically follows that one must support Trump to oppose leftism . Much of modern liberalism is just anti-whiteness, which is a reductive but also accurate lens. Or the invocation of the noble savage trope . Had the races been reversed, the Penny story would have been ignored.

I've long had a feeling of disquiet about just how far removed from the necessities imposed on us by the fact of our physical existence we are in the modern era. For me, this manifested most strongly as a revulsion towards a career that just pushes paper or people around, and made me interested in STEMy stuff, but I don't think I'm alone in this. I think this sense of disquiet undergirds a lot of strange behavior you can observe in left wing hippies and right wing homesteader types. For some people it isn't the disconnection from physical reality (by this I mean mostly agriculture and manufacturing), but instead from what one might call the societal production function. My grandmother once remarked that as a girl she thought the only jobs worth doing were being a soldier, a teacher, or a farmer, and I think this sentiment was coming from a similar place as my feeling that you have to be getting your hands at least a little dirty.

I think you're a bit like my grandmother in that you feel that there are certain social truths that will remain inescapable so long as we are a bunch of jumped up apes. As I get older, I've started to come around to this view more even as I loosen my grip on my old feeling that work is fake unless you're building a little. Pinker really convinced me that Hobbes was right, and watching the world devolve into chaos as US hegemony fades is only strengthening that view.

I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool

I failed/dropped out of community college and switched to a trade, does that count? Granted lots of that was due to idiotic decisions advisors pushed me towards(who thinks taking calculus with no precal was a good idea) and some of it was personal issues. I probably would have gone to college on a wordcel liberal arts degree otherwise.

It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.

I think it’s not just that liberals don’t stop and consider that people are inherently bad and someone has to impose order. I think a lot of them don’t consider that someone has to do that in meatspace, in real life, go and physically take and action which has a real world effect according to the laws of Newton.

I get this all the time talking to motteizeans about automation. But chatgpt will do it! Ok, how’s chatgpt supposed to mop floors and pick peaches and build fences? America is a high-labor cost economy, and so is Germany and Canada and all the rest. A machine which can acceptably replace a human worker is already back ordered and guess what, we still need blue collar workers doing things other than fixing robots.

And with the current border situation that’s the disconnect; Greg Abbott knows the mandarins in Washington can say whatever they want, but privates and captains(and sergeants etc) on the border have to listen to them for it to take any effect. My bafflement was less ‘what does he think he’s doing and how does he think he’ll get away with it’ and more ‘why now, when he’ll gain control of the house in November and the post-election shenanigans give him a lot of political cover’.

I've ridden a lot of subways and never seen a schizophrenic attack anyone, so I'm going to be reluctant to agree that I have some Ivory-tower blindspot in my own knowledge of the subject. Be loud and annoying and smelly, sure, but that's not the same thing, especially when we're talking about justifications for killing them.

I would agree that I have a blindspot to some type of worldview where that is a default assumption about how the world works, where there's a belief that deadly attacks on subways happen all the time and it's a huge failing that the government hasn't stopped them and every citizen needs to be armed and ready to deploy deadly force against them at all times. Or whatever your actually position here is, for being the only concrete example you give you really don't spend much time outlining it.

But I really do believe that worldview is just factually wrong, my personal experiences and those of other people I know who ride the subway seem to confirm it, I'm not aware of any stats that contradict it and if they were shockingly strong I would sort of expect to know it.

Which brings us back to the point that it seems like you're making two different claims here, 1. that liberals are blind to the ways that non-liberals view and think about the world, in ways that lead to communication breakdowns and strife, and 2. that liberals are blind to portions of empirical reality that they can't/won't acknowledge.

1 is trivially true, and I would say fully bi-directional; it's just a description of what the culture war is, more or less, or even just what tribalism is more generally.

2 requires actual examples to back it up, and I don't buy it from the only one you give.

Schizophrenic attacks are just the worst part of a class of associated antisocial behaviors. Along with X number of actual attacks go X * *Y numbers of pools of urine on the subway, X * Z incidents of verbal harassment, etc. which are on a continuum of "how bad can people behave" that has schizophrenic attacks as one of its endpoints.

Sure, but we were talking about extrajudicial killings here.

I agree that those other things exist, but so do liberals. I and they have lots of proposals to fix those things, which conservatives have variously opposed for decades or centuries. That's not a blind spot, at most it's policy disagreement.

Hlynka was using a specific discussion he had with a specific person about a specific killing to say that liberals have a blind spot about why a private citizen might need to kill someone on the subway and why that's justified and heroic. I don't see a connection between that and public urination, unless you can explain it more clearly.

  • -12

Genuine question - have you ever been in a fight or other violent situation that escalated suddenly? Not like a shoving match that turned into a sort of wrestling match with a few frat boy haymakers thrown in. A real unexpected fight. Maybe someone tried to mug you.

Because even though I haven't personally seen a schizophrenic on the subway get to the point of committing attempted murder, I routinely saw the near potential for it. As in, being fully aware that that smelly weird dude could be hammering on some passer-by within 5 seconds. Why/how? My own personal experience with violence.

As a good research exercise, go watch some videos on the "Police Activity" channel on YouTube. Choose any that involve a shooting. These showcase just how quickly a "calm scene" can turn into dozens of shots fired. This will also show the utter lunacy of ideas around "warning shots" or "deescalation" by cops.

A friend has a good metaphor about human (esp male) latent violence - it's like a garage door spring. 99% of the time, it's this utterly forgettable thing that you are completely unaware of even as you are very close to it. In the rare situation in which it makes itself known, it is incredibly fast and violent (garage door springs can fucking end you).

But that explosive lethal potential is always there. But you don't see it, do you? Isn't that exactly what @HlynkaCG said?

It seems to me that his argument is that as a matter of objective fact, whether it is always there is irrelevant, compared to the rate that it actually becomes a problem. He sees the bums as rude and smelly, you and Hlynka see them as dangerous, but he's saying his perception is born out by the actual stats, and yours is not. Therefore, he sides with something like "bums aren't actually dangerous, so people who hurt bums claiming they're dangerous should have just left them alone instead."

Presumably, pointing to cases where the bums actually were dangerous won't change his mind, unless those cases were common enough to actually constitute a serious problem in his mind, and then my guess is that his prefered solution would be housing policy or treatment or something aimed at the systemic problem, not to allow vigilante violence.

That's my guess, anyway.

Yes, I've been in situations that escalated to real violence, none where anyone was killed but a few were people were stabbed and got an ambulance.

I don't let it make me paranoid and frightened every time I ride the subway, I don't let it make me support policies that aren't supported by statistics or utilitarianism.

Of course the potential for violence is latent in any situation involving traditional-gender-norm men... feminists have been pointing that out for a very long time, I'm sympathetic to their position. The way that this makes weaker and more vulnerable people afraid and deferential even when violence is not explicitly happening in the moment is part of what they mean by 'patriarchy'; the way that this makes people suspicious of and pre-emptively violent towards men who are doing nothing wrong is part of what they mean by 'toxic masculinity' and 'the patriarchy hurts men too'.

The fact that the right thinks the left is blind to the fact that the latent potential for violence exists around all men, when this has been central to feminist theory for so long, kind of strikes me as one of those things that happens when you accept the toxoplasmic strawman version of the other side's position, instead of exploring that community and literature for yourself. I expect myself to be wrong about a lot of right-wing positions in this approximate way, and I feel like I strongly observe this happening whenever I use feminist academic terminology on non-left spaces. /shrug.

But, again, as I understand Hlynka, they're not just claiming a difference in perspective and worldview like what would happen if you're subconsciously aware of the potential for violence in non-violent situations. They're claiming an empirical failure to accurately understand and predict the world, in ways that would justify things like applauding pre-emptive vigilantism and calling for more of it.

And I'm saying, no, I don't buy that on the empirical facts and statistics, and no, I don't buy that on some experience-driven 'sense' of how 'dangerous' the world is that exists outside the data itself.

I don't let it make me support policies that aren't supported by statistics

I think you might want to take a little peek at the theory of black swan events. "Stats say this crazy man only has a 1% chance of ending my life. No need to worry!"

or utilitarianism.

You mean the philosophy that leads to eugenics and "global optimization via local genocide." Fuck outta here with that nonsense.

'toxic masculinity' and 'the patriarchy hurts men too'.

Spoke too soon. Fuck outta here with THAT nonsense.

@Mods: I'll self-penalize here with a one day self-ban for this "boo outgroup." I should've not engaged. But I failed.

@Mods: I'll self-penalize here with a one day self-ban for this "boo outgroup." I should've not engaged. But I failed.

2-day ban.

"Stats say this crazy man only has a 1% chance of ending my life. No need to worry!"

There's a difference between 1% and .000000000001%

You mean the philosophy that leads to eugenics and "global optimization via local genocide."

Good steelman.

Spoke too soon. Fuck outta here with THAT nonsense.

Hey look, I was right.

The fact that the right thinks the left is blind to the fact that the latent potential for violence exists around all men, when this has been central to feminist theory for so long, kind of strikes me as one of those things that happens when you accept the toxoplasmic strawman version of the other side's position, instead of exploring that community and literature for yourself.

Is this going to be propped up as another example of "guesswho baiting people with bad faith" and used against him, while right-wingers say more vile shit on the regular and stay untouched just because their opponents don't flip out on them?

"Saying vile shit" is not what we mod for. "Flipping out on people" is.

Am I the only one that gets tired of this guy’s schtick? It’s so repetitive and egotistical

  • -18

Not nearly as tired as I am of people who want to flash an Applause light as they tee off on someone who annoys them. No, you aren't the only one who has beef with Hlynka. However, considering that that post got three AAQC nominations, your feeling is clearly not universal. More importantly, your post contributes nothing of value and is antagonistic, personal, and an attempt to build consensus ("Hey everyone, Hylnka sure is annoying, amirite?")

Normally I'd just give you a warning, but since you've already been banned twice for this kind of low effort shit-flinging, I'm just going to go straight to another 30-day timeout, and probably a permaban the next time you do this.

I'm just going to go straight to another 30-day timeout, and probably a permaban the next time you do this.

You should probably make note in the rules that only Hlynka gets infinite temp bans. People seem to be getting confused.

Passive-aggressive snarkiness is not the most effective way to communicate a complaint about moderation.

If you think Hlynka has broken the rules in this case, report the post (though I will tell you up front I see no violations).

It's a little hard, when he's been asked to expand on what he means, to then complain that he's being egotistical when doing so.

No, you're not alone. I agree with him on most things and even I find his smug low-effort one-liners and condescending attitude tiring, though he's far from the most smarmy or condescending person on here.

I think this particular post of his is actually much better than his average, though. Particularly the last paragraph.

i'd say you have to have thick skin to post here. part of the problem is sometimes you cannot tell who is serious or not. (Poe's Law). I think a quarter to third of these posts are trolling or some ulterior motive.

Maybe so, though I'm not sure how it relates to my post. I'm definitely sincere here. I post here to give the normie religious-man-with-a-family opinion because a lot of users seem unfamiliar with it, and also to have my beliefs about my outgroup challenged. Special thanks to the inveterate left-wingers who post here. I'm always sad to see a left-leaning post downvoted.

At least he's not calling everyone who has a notion of political/social progress progressives. Inability of liberals to comprehend non-liberal viewpoints is much more reasonable IMO.

Yes. Tried writing a thoughtful response expressing confusion but interest. Got a quick, careless, boring reply.

You should've just said something like

I accept that as weak evidence against a Leviathan-shaped hole existing

,

Seeing as I find veterans insufferably obnoxious this isn't a surprise to me.

Those kinds of quips don't result in any Mod response and can net you quite a few upvotes! :D

@Amadan

I rarely agree with Hlynka but there's a wide gulf of antagonism between referring to groups and going after individual posters. Also, those responses to your post were about as low effort as your response was and not directed at the higher effort top-level post, so I'm not sure why you're complaining about this being analogous.

My response was an attempt to give OP exactly why they asked for (steelman arguments for veganism). The “low effort” rule is intended to exclude “three word shit-posts”, which mine is definitely not.

Their responses were literally just boo-out-group and therefore almost the epitome of the “three word shit-post”. Therefore, they consisted of entirely 100% rule-breaking content.

Under your odd interpretation that relies only on length, any comment consisting of a simple clarifying question would now be allowed to be responded to with shit posts.

Edit: when some members of this forum are EAs/rationalists/veterans - that distinction is pretty narrow.

Well, now you're moving the goalposts, I wasn't talking about whether they broke the rules but if they were comparable to the above post's rulebreaking.

It's not about length, you literally didn't put in enough effort for me to adequately understand what you meant by your response because it was just a vague half-answer that may as well have told him to google something. Which could have been a glib dismissal (as a sarcastic example of the responses to yours) or a genuine attempt to direct him to information but it was vague enough that I couldn't parse it.

I don't think anyone should be in trouble for their posts in that thread but if they are it should start with the OP. The OP post was literally just boo outgroup disguised as boo ingroup with some extra boo outgroup thrown in as well. The fact that you were hurt as a vegan is important but you never made mention of that in your post and kept it vague. If you hadn't been vague and said you were a vegan and effective altruists/rationalists have a good handle on explaining the rationale behind their lifestyle that isn't annoying then the responses to yours would be as bad as the one you're saying is comparable but you didn't, which is my point about being low-effort, not that you broke the rules but that you simply didn't put the full amount of effort I would expect of someone invested in the topic to give, which as a bystander makes me think you don't care all that much on the topic and the responses to yours may break the rules but don't really matter all that much because they're responding to someone that doesn't care all that much.

Maybe it's just me but I think the rules are sieved through each response made. Nearly every post three deep breaks the rules but eventually it becomes "no fun allowed", no quips, no jokes, no turn of phrases, no statement of opinions without reams of ink. If you have a problem with those posts they stem from the OP and you really have a problem with that which basically stated the exact same thing but also said "change my mind." I understand you were hurt but you really shouldn't hold onto it like this because this situation is not comparable.

I still clicked upvote because I can't wrap my mind around Hlynka's Ilyad and this explanation is satisfactory.


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